Well, it’s July 2, which for most people means it’s almost the holiday weekend. In the car world, though, the beginning of July marks the end of the second quarter of the year and the release of automakers’ Q2 sales numbers. If you’re a numbers nerd, it’s one of the biggest holidays of the year, but something tells us Tesla really wishes it could have skipped releasing its Q2 numbers this year. That’s because, no matter how you look at it, sales are down significantly.
According to Tesla’s official numbers, it delivered 384,122 vehicles in Q2, a roughly 14% drop compared to the 443,956 vehicles it delivered in Q2 2024. That’s also about 18% lower than the 466,140 deliveries we saw in Q2 2023. That also brings Tesla’s deliveries through the first half of the year to 720,803, marking a drop of more than 13% compared to the 830,766 deliveries Tesla managed through the first half of 2024. H1 deliveries in 2023 were 889,015, meaning 2025’s deliveries were a full 19% lower than they were two years ago.
Of course, since this is Tesla we’re talking about, the news that Tesla’s declining sales have continued will actually make the stock price go up. It may not make sense, but hey, that’s just business, baby.
The Cybertruck won’t save Tesla
The Model 3 and Model Y continued to dominate Tesla’s sales numbers, accounting for 373,728 of Q2’s 384,122 deliveries. That means Tesla only delivered 10,394 examples of the Model S, Model X and Cybertruck. Granted, the Model S and X are ancient and still expensive, so you wouldn’t expect them to sell well, but even if 10,000 of those deliveries were Cybertrucks, that works out to roughly 40,000 Cybertrucks a year. It wasn’t too long ago that Tesla was telling us it would sell 250,000 Cybertrucks a year, but I’m sure it’s fine. That’s probably fine, right?
Another potential problem for Tesla is that it’s also sitting on a lot of inventory. While it only delivered 384,122 vehicles in Q2, it actually built 410,244. That’s an extra 26,122 vehicles just sitting there, waiting to be sold. That alone isn’t automatically concerning, but Tesla also produced 25,934 more vehicles than it delivered in Q1 of this year, which could be a sign that Tesla is overproducing compared to demand. With Model 3 and Model Y, that isn’t as much of a red flag since sales numbers are still pretty high, but Tesla also says it built an extra 3,015 “other models,” which definitely seems like a problem when it only delivered 10,394. As unpopular as those models are, the extra units are probably going to take a long time to sell, and Tesla has to find somewhere to store them until they do.
Of course, Tesla CEO Elon Musk will tell you that vehicle sales don’t matter now that Tesla is an AI and robotics company that’s totally about to solve autonomy for real this time. Sure, the robotaxi rollout is going terribly, but just you wait. It’s definitely going to happen. Until then, we’re just going to wait until Tesla’s earnings call on July 23.
