Tesla (TSLA) confirms delivery of 495,570 EVs, way below its own guidance

Tesla (TSLA) released its production and delivery results for the fourth quarter and full year 2024 today.

The automaker confirmed having delivered 495,570 electric vehicles, way below expectations and its own guidance from just two months ago.

As we reported earlier this week, the analyst consensus for the fourth quarter was 507,000 vehicles delivered. The street expected Tesla to fall short of its goal to deliver more than 515,000 vehicles in order to be slightly up on deliveries for the full year 2024 compared to 2023.

This morning, Tesla released its official production and delivery results, confirming that it produced 459,445 vehicles and delivered 495,570 vehicles in Q4:

• Model 3/Y
  • Production: 436,718 units
  • Deliveries: 471,930 units
  • Subject to Operating Lease Accounting: 5%
• Other Models
  • Production: 22,727 units
  • Deliveries: 23,640 units
  • Subject to Operating Lease Accounting: 6%
• Total
  • Production: 459,445 units
  • Deliveries: 495,570 units
  • Subject to Operating Lease Accounting: 5%

While this is both below Wall Street expectations and below the company’s own guidance, it is Tesla’s new quarterly record for deliveries.

Tesla achieved those results while implementing its largest-ever discounts and incentives through direct discounts on cars, boosted referral programs, and incentives like free Supercharging, free Full Self-Driving, and more.

With these results from Q4, here are Tesla’s total production and delivery numbers for 2024:

That’s a slight 1% decrease in deliveries compared to the 1,808,581 vehicles delivered in 2023, but it’s a giant swing in growth from a 38% increase in 2023 versus 2022.

Tesla’s stock went from being up almost 2% in pre-market trading to down 3% after the release of the delivery results.

However, there’s a silver lining in Tesla’s results. While the company’s main business remains automotive, it has a growing energy storage business, and Tesla has started including energy storage deployment in its quarterly delivery results over the last year.

Today, Tesla confirmed that it deployed 11 GWh of energy storage through its Megapack and Powerall products – a new record.

Electrek’s Take

This is worse than I expected. Again, Tesla hadn’t offered quarterly delivery guidances in years, but when it did, it was pretty good.

The reason for that is that it generally gave it when already into the quarter with great order visibility. As Tesla claims, it has the best sale data of any automaker thanks to its direct sale model.

But this time, it was off by 20,000 units or even more since it claimed that it would achieve slight growth in overall deliveries for the year with a strong Q4.

Going from 38% growth to -1% while adding a vehicle to the lineup (Cybertruck), and having all its factories fully ramped, and offering the biggest discounts and incentives ever, is clearly a bad sign.

Many Tesla fans would note that the automotive market is down. While that’s true, the EV market, excluding Tesla, is up worldwide.

Normally, It would be time for some shake-up at the leadership level, but the CEO has full control over the board and a strong base of extremely loyal shareholders who boosted the stock not based on these concerning fundamentals, but based on the anticipation of collusion at the federal level now that the CEO bought the elections.

It’s a wild situation. Fun times to be a Tesla reporter.