The missing piece of the puzzle here is what is the overall percent increase of EVs in total car sales. (Not a gotcha. I have no idea). A smaller piece of a bigger pie isn’t necessarily terrible.
Just like Amazon.
I have no idea what is going to happen and my suspicion is that you’re largely correct about the robots but Tesla will be selling lots of cars for the foreseeable future.
Tesla sales seem to have maxed out at about 1.5-2 million cars a year. Out of about 90 million cars a year sold.
I don’t know the exact % that are EVs since there are different kinds of EVs (BEVs, PHEVs, EREVs, etc) and the figures differ on whether you only mean BEVs, or if you’re including PHEVs, etc.
However, the % of cars that are EVs keeps growing. However Tesla sales are flat at under 2 million. I don’t see Tesla magically selling 5 million cars anytime soon, even though the % of new cars sold that are EVs keeps going up.
I believe in 2020, about 3% of new car sales were BEVs, in 2025 it was about 15%. I think total EVs (including hybrids) was close to 25% of new car sales.
So I get the impression that Elon Musk is hyping Optimus, the bipedal humanoid robot being developed by Tesla, as the Next Big Thing, and a justification for the company’s ridiculous stock price. And yet, last week, dozens (or even over a hundred) humanoid robots competed in a half-marathon race in Beijing yesterday. So what’s so great about Optimus that makes it special? (And you could certainly ask the same question about Tesla’s automobiles when many other companies also have electric autos.)
Other than the self driving system, not much but that is a big thing for a lot of people. I’d love to drive a different EV if it had anything close. Almost anyone can use the charging network now so that’s gone away.
I have seen no evidence that Teslas bipedals are better than other ones other than maybe their ability to quickly scale.
By quickly scale, do you mean produce many robots quickly? If so, I think Chinese manufacturers can beat Tesla in that regard.
True.
Nothing is special about optimus. The field of bipedal robots is huge, and there isn’t any reason I can tell to believe Tesla will be the pioneer. When bipedal robots are ready for home use, people will have a dozen plus companies to pick from, which means companies will have to operate on razor thin margins to gain market share. The only time when a company can charge huge margins in a competitive market (from what I know) is when the item is a status symbol (iPhones, harley davidson, etc). But Tesla is not a status symbol, it is an anti-status symbol.
Also while some bipedal robots are already starting to be sold for home use, tesla’s robots are still controlled by a human. Here is a video of an optimus robot where you can see the human controller take off the VR headset and then the robot falls down.
Tesla is a scam, and after it is proven that Optimus can’t compete in the robotics field, Musk will move to the next project (internet satellites, space travel, etc) and claim he has the inside track on that potential multi trillion dollar industry to justify the high stock prices.
Here are Tesla’s car delivery results for Q2.
Q2’26: 480.1k
compared to
Q1’26: 358.0k
Q2’25: 384.1k
That’s a 35% year over year increase and the first year over year quarterly increase in two years.
Earnings call on July 22nd
480,000 cars sold in one quarter is still a tiny number and doesn’t justify a trillion-dollar market cap.
That should have been quarter over quarter
Those two quarters were particularly rough, 480k is in line with their historical quarterly numbers:
Tesla Inc (TSLA) - Total Deliveries (Quarterly) - United St…
There’s basically been 0 growth over the last 4 years, nearest I can tell. They can try to spin it but investors should be smarter than that.
I know that’s not the case, but…
But BYD did even better - they delivered over 557k EV vehicles in Q2 (only pure battery EVs, not including hybrids).
EV sales in general have done well in no small part to the Hormuz situation. Tesla, despite the big quarter, still lost overall EV market share, as all EV manufacturers did pretty well in Q2.
But, to be fair to Wall Street, the response to the news was not great - shares fell a bit when it was announced.
The day BYD can sell cars in the US will be a very bad one for Tesla.
Doesn’t even have to be BYD. Legacy makers like Toyota and Ford are still in the market and catching up. US EV sales aren’t great right now for reasons but the rest of the world is a rather large market.
Also bad for Tesla - Canada will be allowing some BYD imports.
Exactly. Meanwhile global sales of all EVs have dramatically grown. BEVs sold maybe 5 million cars in 2021, and about 15 million in 2025. Meanwhile Tesla sales have flatlined at about 1.5-2 million during that period.
I will never understand it. Its the same wth SpaceX. People act like SpaceX is the only private rocket company in existence (it isn’t) or its the only rocket company using low earth orbit satellites for internet (it isn’t).
Bezo’s blue origin is worth 50-100 billion, meanwhile SpaceX is worth 2 trillion. It makes no sense.
Musk is an amazing con man. He keeps promising that he will corner some multi-trillion dollar market, then when he fails he pivots to the next con and false promise. Whether its EVs, self driving, bipedal robots, rocket ships, satellite internet, etc.
And they have not been developing new car models, as does every other car company.
Telsa literally just released a new model to replace the X which was recently killed. It’s the Y-L which is longer tha nthe regular Y and has an extra row of seats. Maybe that doesn’t count since it’s a variant of an existing model and in fairness it will probably be a niche product. The Y itself got an upgrade recently.
They are also working on a revamped Roadster set to be released next year and a van version of the Robotaxi for 2028. There is a majorly updated Semi truck as well. Allegedly they are working on a low cost EV but that’s been rumored for a while.
I think that generally having a small number of models is a good thing for a car company. It was, in my opinion, good when GM slimmed down.
What other models of vehicles should they be developing?
Googling, the Y-L is only produced in China and apparently only available there, Australia and New Zealand. And I’m not sure I’d even recognize it as a new model if I even saw one. I have no idea what other models they should be be developing but something different would be nice. A conventional pickup, perhaps, or a delivery truck like the one Rivian made for Amazon. They really seem to be coasting.
The Y-L recently became available in the US
They already have a pickup truck. I’d like to forget it too but it exists. A delivery truck isn’t a bad idea but it would be another niche thing.
Did you happen to notice the adjective I used (“A conventional pickup, perhaps”)?