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Tesla stock is down roughly 20% year-to-date in 2026, and JPMorgan thinks the bleeding is far from over. Analyst Ryan Brinkman reiterated his Underweight rating this week and stuck with a $145 price target — implying another ~60% downside from where TSLA trades today.
The note landed days after Tesla disclosed a Q1 delivery miss and the largest single-quarter inventory build in company history.
The delivery miss
Tesla reported 358,023 deliveries in Q1 2026, against 408,386 vehicles produced. The 50,363-unit gap is the widest production-over-delivery spread Tesla has ever posted in a single quarter — a glaring inventory signal.
Deliveries came in 4% below the Bloomberg consensus of 372,000 and 7% below JPMorgan’s own 385,000 estimate.
JPMorgan’s numbers
Brinkman cut his Q1 EPS estimate to $0.30 from $0.43, putting him below the Bloomberg consensus of $0.38. He also trimmed his full-year 2026 EPS forecast to $1.80 from $2.00, now sitting under the $1.95 Street consensus.
The $145 price target has been Brinkman’s standing call for months, and he’s now one of the most bearish analysts on the Street. At current levels around $360, the target implies roughly 60% downside.
The headwinds stacking up
Brinkman’s bear case rests on a few converging pressures: the Trump administration let the $7,500 federal EV tax credit expire, removing a major demand lever in Tesla’s most profitable market; Chinese competition continues to compress the global market Tesla used to dominate; and the brand damage from Elon Musk’s political activities remains, in Brinkman’s words, difficult to quantify but very real.
We’ve been tracking the collapse of Tesla’s brand perception in Europe and the accelerating BYD competition in China for more than a year. The Q1 print is what those trends look like when they finally hit the income statement.
Electrek’s Take
There’s a real wrinkle here that the JPMorgan note doesn’t fully capture: Tesla actually had a pretty good March on the sales side, particularly in Europe and parts of Asia. Some of that bounce was tied to a renewed spike in gas prices, which historically has been a tailwind for EV demand broadly and Tesla specifically. So the underlying picture isn’t a straight-line collapse — there are pockets where the product is still moving.
What’s strange, and what we’ve never really seen before, is that Tesla stock is now trading inverse to gas prices. Higher gas prices used to be unambiguously good for TSLA. Now the stock barely reacts to a sales tailwind in its core automotive business, and instead trades on Robotaxi vaporware, Optimus demos, and whatever Elon tweeted that morning.
It looks like Tesla shareholders and Elon Musk finally got what they wanted: Tesla doesn’t matter as an automaker anymore. The problem is, the automotive business is the only part of Tesla that actually generates cash. JPMorgan is essentially calling that bluff. When the multiple is built entirely on narrative, a Q1 delivery miss and a record inventory build aren’t supposed to matter — except they clearly do, because the stock is down 20% on the year and the bears are getting louder.
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