Tesla Is Predicting A Bad Fourth Quarter

Happy Tuesday! It’s December 30, 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 looking at Tesla’s upcoming numbers, as well as Porsche’s cost-cutting. We’ll also look at the Pentagon’s latest investment in Israel, and VinFast’s taxi wing. 

Tesla isn’t having a great year, whether in the United States or abroad. The company got a bit of a boost in the third quarter, when the Trump administration ended the $7,500 EV tax credit and sent buyers into a frenzy to get in under the wire, but beyond that the company’s downward slide seems inexorable. Now, it’s doing something weird: Advertising just how little analysts think of the company. From Bloomberg:

Tesla Inc. published a compilation of analyst estimates for vehicle deliveries to its website, and the averages for the current quarter are more pessimistic than those gathered by Bloomberg.

By Tesla’s count, analysts on average expect the company to deliver 422,850 cars in the fourth quarter, down 15% from a year earlier. That compares with a Bloomberg-compiled average of 445,061 vehicles, a 10% drop.

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Tesla’s sales plunged early in the year as the company retooled production lines at each of its assembly plants for the redesigned Model Y, its most popular vehicle. That period also coincided with Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk playing a polarizing role in the Trump administration.

Deliveries jumped to a record in the third quarter, when US consumers rushed to buy electric vehicles before $7,500 federal tax credits ceased at the end of September. Tesla partially offset the loss of those incentives at the beginning of the current quarter by rolling out stripped-down versions of the Model Y sport utility vehicle and Model 3 sedan each priced at under $40,000.

Tesla’s stock is poised to end the year higher despite its vehicle sales slump. The shares were up 14% through Monday’s close, trailing the 17% rise in the S&P 500 Index.

It’s weird for a company to brag that analysts think it will do poorly. It’d be one thing if the automaker knew its year-end numbers would be good — this move could set expectations low, just to have the stock skyrocket when sales are better than predicted — but Tesla has shown no signs of actually being a successful automaker in recent months. Maybe the Tesla team is just really confident in those SpaceX sales, and their ability to pump up year-end numbers. 

Porsche is, in many parts of the world, the archetypal luxury performance car. Sleek, understated, yet capable of hanging with Ferraris and Lamborghinis all the same. That model has worked very well for a very long time, but it seems the tides are starting to turn in Stuttgart. Now, a new CEO plans to tighten the belt. From Automotive News:

When Porsche CEO Oliver Blume said farewell to employees at a town-hall meeting in Stuttgart earlier this month, he appeared surprised by the upbeat mood. There were repeated applause and words of appreciation for the 57-year-old executive, who from January will focus on his role as CEO of Volkswagen Group.

His successor is Michael Leiters, who will join Porsche from McLaren at the start of the year.

Blume leaves behind an impressive record after a decade at the helm of Porsche. When he was promoted to CEO from head of production to CEO in 2015, Porsche delivered about 225,000 vehicles a year and employed roughly 25,000 people, according to its annual report. Last year, deliveries reached 310,000 units and the workforce had grown to about 42,000.

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That picture has now shifted dramatically.

Weakness in China, combined with other challenges such as a faltering electric-vehicle strategy and U.S. tariffs, has led to an unprecedented downturn. In the third quarter, Blume and Chief Financial Officer Jochen Breckner reported a loss; for 2025, Porsche is likely to scrape by with little more than break-even results.

Automakers that cater to the luxury segment are increasingly going after bigger and bigger fish, leaving entry-level luxury behind as they cater to the whales — making low-production cars guaranteed to be collector items, one-off coachbuilds, and the like. As the middle class shrinks ever further, upward mobility within the economy becomes ever more of a myth, and wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of like eight dudes, luxury automakers want to figure out how to sell seven- and eight-figure to those eight dudes. All others be damned. Is that where Porsche wants to go?

United States President Donald Trump hung out with United Nations-recognized perpetrator of genocide Benjamin Netanyahu in Florida recently. As a result of that playdate, The U.S. is now spending $8.6 billion on new fighter jets for Israel. From Reuters:

Boeing was given an $8.6 billion contract for the F-15 Israel Program, the Pentagon said on Monday, after U.S. President Donald Trump met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Florida.

“This contract provides for the design, integration, instrumentation, test, production, and delivery of 25 new F-15IA aircraft for the Israeli Air Force with an option for an additional 25 F-15IA aircraft,” the Pentagon said.

The Pentagon said the contract involved foreign military sales to Israel. The U.S. has long been by far the largest arms supplier to its closest Middle East ally.

American arms manufacturers make a lot of money whenever Israel undertakes military action — even when that action is internationally recognized as genocide. There’s very little fiscal incentive for the United States to push back against whatever action Israel takes, so long as that doesn’t extend to “buying weapons elsewhere.” 

We all know VinFast, but the automaker is part of a sprawling conglomerate known as Vingroup. That group also operates a taxi company — one that exclusively uses VinFast vehicles, naturally — which is now looking to go public at a staggering $20 billion valuation. From Reuters:

Vietnamese electric-vehicle taxi operator Green and Smart Mobility JSC, an affiliate of the Vingroup conglomerate, plans to pursue an international listing with its advisors suggesting a valuation of around $20 billion, Vingroup said late on Monday.

The announcement followed a report by Reuters citing two sources familiar with the matter who said GSM is targeting a debut in Hong Kong by 2027, potentially marking the first initial public offering in the city by a Vietnamese company.

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If GSM achieves such a valuation, the two-year-old ride-hailing company would rival its closest competitor, Nasdaq-listed Southeast Asian Grab (GRAB.O), opens new tab, which has a market capitalisation of approximately $21 billion, according to LSEG data. Grab operates across sectors including mobility, food delivery and digital financial services.

For some context, Uber is valued at over $170 billion — but Lyft, a more direct taxi-company-to-taxi-company comparison, is worth a mere $7.65 billion on the NASDAQ. When it comes to moving people around, it seems the United States is not the center of the economic universe. Southeast Asia seems to have us beat.

Live bootlegs are so important! Versions of songs that exist nowhere else, stage banter never heard before or again. They’re time capsules, really. One of my favorite tracks is a Mountain Goats live bootleg, and I’ll cherish that one forever.

Robert Plant truly has an incredible voice. Yes, I did check Google before putting that sentence in the present tense. Don’t worry, he’s still kicking.