In theory, pricier gas should be good for Tesla’s sales, but even Trump’s war with Iran couldn’t save Tesla’s Q1. The electric automaker missed expectations last quarter, delivering a claimed 358,023 vehicles instead of the 368,903 deliveries that Reuters reports Wall Street expected. That’s still better than Q1 2025, when Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s vile personal politics were more at the forefront of buyers’ minds, and the company only managed 336,681 deliveries. Not that any of this matters, since, as we all know, Tesla is now an AI/robotics company, not a car company. Delivery numbers are old news.
The fools who still think Tesla is a car company will, of course, point to the fact that Tesla produced 50,363 more vehicles in Q1 than it delivered as a sign that even Tesla misjudged demand for its EVs, especially now that Republicans killed the EV tax credit. It’s also the largest inventory buildup that we’ve seen in recent years, even beating the previous record that Tesla set in Q1 2024. Whether that proves to be a problem for Tesla probably depends on what EV demand looks like in Q2. The pricier the gas, the better things should go for Tesla.
“I believe the inventory build is due to both the new normal of the EV (tax credit) expiration and growing threat of competition as well as the need for lower interest rates to drive consumer demand,” Tesla investor and Camelthorn Investments adviser Shawn Campbell told Reuters. “The one positive is that high gas prices will probably have more people consider EVs, but that would take time to see in the numbers and would require a sustained period of higher gas prices.”
Robots and robotaxis
Tesla’s Q1 2025 deliveries may have been higher than they were in Q1 2025, but deliveries have also dropped for the last three quarters in a row. They were also lower than Tesla’s Q1 2024, and after two years of declining overall sales, we may be looking at a third. If Tesla were still a car company, that could be a problem, but remember, the automaker whose name is synonymous with EVs is no longer a car company, and anyone worried about deliveries is going to look like an idiot when Elon sells a humanoid robot to every single person on earth.
“As ever with Tesla, a few thousand cars either way is unlikely to move the dial on valuation. The bulk of the investment case rests on what is coming next rather than where the core auto business sits today,” Tesla investor and Hargreaves Lansdown senior equity analyst Matt Britzman told Reuters. And that’s certainly one way to put it. You could also just say Tesla is a meme stock that has nothing to do with company performance and is propped up by cultists who refuse to accept that Elon Musk might not be some infallible god, but that doesn’t sound as business-y.
If you ignore Musk’s long record of overpromising and underdelivering, from what we’ve seen so far, the “what is coming next” sure doesn’t look like it’ll bring in big money anytime soon. Recent video of the Optimus robot in operation makes it look like a joke, and Tesla’s big robotaxi launch in Austin, Texas, appears to have been cut back from eight to a mere four unsupervised robotaxi prototypes. Oh, and the robotaxis reportedly crash at a rate at least four times higher than human drivers. Investors may not care that Tesla missed expectations last quarter, but eventually, they’re going to have to care that Elon keeps promising a future he’ll never actually deliver.
