Tesla Is In Rough Shape Ahead Of Earnings Call

Good morning! It’s Tuesday, April 22, 2025, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. This is where you’ll find the most important stories that are shaping the way Americans drive and get around.

In this morning’s edition, we’re talking about the state of Tesla heading into this afternoon’s earnings call as well as a production pause for the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Dodge Durango. We’re also checking in on Nissan’s pricing strategy amid the tariff fiasco and a recall impacting 10s of thousands of Dodge Hornets and Alfa Romeo Tonales.

Lock in for a busy Tuesday, friends.

Tesla’s earnings call, scheduled for today at 5:30 p.m. EST, is looking like a real make-or-break moment for both Elon Musk and his now-struggling automaker. Investors are looking for the CEO to inject some sort of excitement back into the brand as profits slip and promised future products still remain nebulous ideas at best.

2025 has been an awful year for Tesla — thanks largely to the actions of Musk and his love of Donald Trump and the far-right. Its sales have hit a nearly three-year low in the first three months of the year. It has led Wall Street analysts to slash growth expectations. Investors are also fleeing the company, leading to a 53% plunge in the automaker’s stock price since it hit a record in December of 2024. From Bloomberg:

“Musk needs to bring the voltage on this earnings call to get the stock out of stall speed,” said Dave Mazza, chief executive officer of Roundhill Investments, who owns the stock. “Tesla’s stock is stuck in an information air pocket as Elon Musk focused on his DOGE work, while their car sales skid and political headwinds build in important markets.”

Shoring up investor confidence will largely depend on whether Musk starts to step away from his involvement with the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency. When reports this month suggested that such a move might be in the offing, shares of the company rallied, shrugging off weak sales number.

Beyond that, investors are looking for details on planned launch of the self-driving vehicle later this summer, and details on any new models at a time when competition from other electric vehicles is ramping up globally.

Earnings for the first quarter of 2025 are expected to fall pretty drastically from 2024’s levels, and revenue is estimated to stay fairly flat. Analysts have been dialing back profit expectations, landing somewhere around the -12% mark, and revenue is expected to be down over 6%.

Investors are still looking for more clarity on Tesla’s future plans for autonomous vehicles (which isn’t happening anytime soon) and a cheaper offering (which also isn’t happening anytime soon). In fact, just yesterday we reported that Tesla was delaying its theoretical lower-cost model by at least three months.

Who really knows what today’s earnings report will hold? If Tesla’s board was serious about turning the shop around, maybe it would suggest that Musk step down. That’ll never happen, but a girl can dream.

The Stellantis production plants that build the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Dodge Durango will be halted next week in the latest cutback move by the struggling automaker. The Mack and Jefferson North facilities on Detroit’s east side are set to halt production for the week of April 28. The Mack plant is set to take another week off starting on May 19 as well.

The automaker claims the downtime is related to the transition to a refreshed 2026 Grand Cherokee, which is set to come out later this year. However, it’s not exactly clear that makes sense, since the company also said it planned to expand production of the 2025 version of the SUV for now. I’m not completely sure how both things can be true. From the Detroit News:

“To support a successful launch and ensure the highest build quality of the new model, we are extending production of the 2025 Jeep Grand Cherokee at the Detroit Assembly Complex plants,” the Stellantis statement from spokesperson Ann Marie Fortunate said. “As a result, both Mack and Jefferson will observe a down week the week of April 28.”

Both SUVs made at Detroit Assembly Complex had sluggish sales in the first quarter, with Grand Cherokee down 11% year-over-year to 48,465 units sold, and Durango falling 9% to 13,701 sold.

Production at several Stellantis plants has been scaled back in recent weeks after President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on imported cars took effect at the start of April. The automaker paused production at two major assembly plants, one in Mexico and one in Canada, which triggered about 900 temporary layoffs at several of its American powertrain and stamping facilities.

The Toluca Assembly Plant in Mexico, which builds the Jeep Compass crossover and Jeep Wagoneer S electric SUV, will remain idle through the end of the month.

In a bit of good news for Stellantis production, the Windsor Assembly Plant, which builds Chrysler minivans and the Dodge Charger Daytona, resumed production for two shifts on April 22 after being off for the last two weeks. It brings several thousand employees who were temporarily laid off back to work.

Its Warren Truck Assembly Plant, which builds the Jeep Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer, is also down right now through early May. Stellantis blames an engine shortage, not tariffs, for this stoppage. It recently routed more of its twin-turbocharged Hurricane straight-six engines to the better-selling Ram 1500 pickup truck.

Things are looking rough out there for ol’ Stellantis.

Nissan is the latest automaker to come out and say pricing won’t change because of President Donald Trump’s tariffs and trade war just yet. The company told dealers it won’t raise prices on imported vehicles until June 2 at the earliest. It’s also apparently considering increasing output at two underutilized assembly plants in the U.S.

The Japanese automaker said it has a nearly three-month supply of vehicles that aren’t going to be impacted by tariffs. It’s also reportedly “war-gaming” for what to do once that inventory runs out. From Automotive News:

“While we know these new vehicle tariffs will have an impact on affordability for car buyers over a long period of time, we will try to minimize that impact on Nissan buyers,” Nissan U.S. sales boss Vinay Shahani told retailers in an April 15 memo.

[…]

Nissan is “evaluating how to quickly leverage more of our available [U.S] capacity … in the year ahead,” Shahani said in the memo reviewed by Automotive News. “Stay tuned.”

Nissan also plans to increase output for its four core models — the Rogue, Pathfinder, Murano and Frontier. Together, they accounted for 48 percent of Nissan’s sales in 2024. It’s planning to boost output at its Smyrna, Tennessee and Canton, Mississippi plants, which only operated at about half of their combined capacity last year.

But this year, Shahani said, that extra U.S. manufacturing capacity presents Nissan a “path through [the tariff] storm.”

Nissan will maintain a second shift on the Rogue assembly line in Smyrna this summer, reversing an earlier decision to cut output because of oversupply.

Nissan Americas Chairperson Christian Meunier told Automotivesaid April 16 that Rogue crossover production at Smyrna will increase by 54 percent, or 60,000 vehicles, over the next 12 months.

Nissan has been struggling for quite a while now, so I suppose it’s good that it’s doing everything it can to get out ahead of the tariffs before they become a real issue for it. If it’s about to keep prices low as everyone else is forced to jack up MSRPs across the board, it might be able to claw back some market share.

Stellantis is recalling 48,494 2023-25 Dodge Hornets and Alfa Romeo Tonales because the rearview camera might not display when the car is shifted into reverse, according to a report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Despite the broad scope of the recall, it’s expected that just 1% of all vehicles will have the defect. From Automotive News:

When an affected vehicle is put into reverse, the rearview image may not display. This is because of a cold soldering on a voltage regulator and/or a software defect within the microprocessor that may result in a black screen instead of the rearview image.

The automaker opened an investigation into the issue in March 2024 when Stellantis Europe’s customer experience department first received reports of the problem.

Affected vehicles may end up getting their radio replaced and/or the software update to fix the issue. Stellantis says it’ll fully reimburse those who paid out of their own pocket to remedy the problem. 

Dealers are expected to be notified of the recall on April 22, and owners will be alerted by June 4.

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