According to the data in the article, Tesla has a 1.5% YoY Q1 delivery growth. Hardly disastrous to sell more cars this quarter than in the same quarter last year.
422,875 in Q1 2023
433,371 in Q1 2024
Edit: I was corrected that in fact deliveries were down 8.5% YoY. That does seem disastrous, particularly since they are banking on growth.
Production out pacing demand is a bad sign. Tesla has burned through all the early adopters (who are generally more forgiving) and they way more competition. They need to go after the early majority population.
Also, Elon is no longer charming. Like it or not it matters. No one can name a CEO of another car company so there less a 1:1 correlation between Elon alienating people and a brand.
And regarding the “hardly disastrous” metric, it only matters versus your competition because is measures relative performance to what was available. Taken on its own is meaningless.
The cars being very expensive while also becoming ubiquitous. They could get away with overpriced cars like 5-8 years ago when it was a huge flex to have one. People don't want to pay sports car prices to drive what is essentially the new Corolla (default basic bitch sedan). Also any perceived street cred for choosing a "green" option was eroded because that social segment hates Elon.
Tesla still has perceived quality issues from panel gaps to fires. People don't like paying premium prices for products with issues.
Tesla is still the Apple of the automotive world when it comes to things like right to repair and user privacy. Their vehicles and apps collect a ton of data and telemetry. I'd like to believe this one is a show stopper for more people...but based on the continued popularity of iPhones it clearly isn't a problem for average consumers.
I knew those two as well as the VW CEO, except VW CEO seems to be a revolving door position these days, so my info on that one may be out of date already.
Got caught lying about their emissions then had to pay hefty penalties, and now they can't find anyone to run a company that has destroyed it's good name in an era when "good for the planet" is one of the largest selling points and no one wants to buy their cars.
Yeah, but they've apparently produced ~50k more than delivered. How much does it cost them to store those extra? How much have they invested in those and not quickly recouped their manufacturing cost? So they basically have around 20% of their production numbers just sitting unsold? Those numbers anyway you cut it are very, very bad.
That's also just the most recent quarter. They've been "building inventory" for the past couple of years now and it's a lot closer to 120k cars unaccounted for at this point.
Thank you for the correction. That is certainly a big deal, particularly since they are banking on growth as they aren't yet a huge part of the pie. I amended my above post with your correction.