Tesla is set to report third-quarter vehicle production and delivery numbers on Wednesday.
Analysts are expecting Elon Musk‘s automaker to report about 463,310 deliveries, according to estimates compiled by FactSet StreetAccount. That would include about 435,900 of Tesla’s Model 3 sedans and Model Y SUVs.
Tesla reported deliveries of 435,059 and production of 430,488 vehicles for the same period a year ago, before it was selling the Cybertruck. More recently, Tesla reported deliveries of 443,956 and production of 410,831 vehicles for the second quarter of 2024.
If Tesla meets analysts’ expectations that would represent a 6.5% year-over-year increase for deliveries after declines in the first and second quarters of 2024.
Deliveries are not defined in Tesla’s financial disclosures, but they are the closest approximation to units sold reported by the company.
In the third quarter, as it did earlier this year, Tesla continued to offer a variety of incentives and financing plans to drive sales volumes, particularly in the largest market for EVs in the world, mainland China.
Tesla hasn’t given specific guidance for the full year of deliveries in 2024, but the company has said it expects a lower delivery growth rate this year versus last. Wells Fargo, pointing to this lack of guidance, said in a note that it’s expecting 1.63 million full-year deliveries for Tesla and third-quarter deliveries at around 440,000, below consensus.
Goldman Sachs last week said it expects Tesla deliveries and production “to come in-line with consensus, largely driven by the strength in the China market.” Goldman Sachs recommended buying call options ahead of the Wednesday report.
Robotaxi day in focus
Shares in the EV maker are up more than 20% over the past month, in anticipation that deliveries could improve year over year and sequentially in the third quarter, and ahead of the company’s robotaxi day on Oct. 10.
Tesla plans to host investors and fans at its “We, Robot” marketing event at a Warner Bros. Discovery movie studio in Los Angeles.
The automaker is expected to show off the design of a “dedicated robotaxi,” which Musk has referred to previously as the CyberCab. Tesla may also provide updates on its humanoid robotics project “Optimus” and other automotive and AI-driven products and services.
Tesla EV sales and revenue fell in the first half of 2024, and the company still has yet to deliver a self-driving system that can function as a robotaxi without a human driver at the wheel ready to steer or brake at any time. Tesla also renamed its premium driver assistance option to Full Self-Driving Supervised, tacking on a disclaimer-style term at the end.
Meanwhile, several rivals in the autonomous vehicle industry have begun producing robotaxis, and operating commercial robotaxi services. Rivals include Alphabet-owned Waymo in the U.S., and Pony.ai and Baidu in China. Amazon-owned Zoox is preparing a launch of a commercial robotaxi service in the U.S. as well.
Tesla brand erosion
Some customer interest in buying Tesla vehicles has been chilled by the brand’s strong association with Musk.
The company’s favorability among both liberal and conservative consumers fell in July, according to CivicScience. Tesla favorability dropped with Democrats to 18% in July, down from 39% in January, and it declined among Republicans to 22%, down from 36% in January.
Musk — who also leads SpaceX, X and xAI — has long shared provocative posts on social media, but in recent years, he’s become less filtered and more vociferous online about his right-wing political beliefs.
In July, he publicly endorsed former President Donald Trump, and he frequently posts screeds on X concerning illegal immigration, election fraud, crime, violence and other flashpoint issues.
He has shared political misinformation and deepfakes with his massive online following on X, according to reports by The Associated Press, CNN, NBC News,The New York Times and others. Before Musk acquired Twitter, now known as X, his feed focused more on Tesla and SpaceX, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
Among the posts Musk recently spread on X were false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets. The Springfield Police Division, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and other local groups have all said the claims were baseless.
It remains to be seen whether left-leaning customers’ view of Musk will weigh on deliveries this year. Pew Research has found that Democrats have a much more favorable view of battery-electric vehicles and are more likely to buy them than Republicans in the U.S.
Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of U.K. and Ireland at Salesforce, speaking during the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, California, on Sept. 17, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
LONDON — The UK chief executive of Salesforce wants the Labor government to regulate artificial intelligence — but says it’s important that policymakers don’t tar all technology companies developing AI systems with the same brush.
Speaking to CNBC in London, Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of UK and Ireland at Salesforce, said the American enterprise software giant takes all legislation “seriously.” However, she added that any British proposals aimed at regulating AI should be “proportional and tailored.”
Bahrololoumi noted that there’s a difference between companies developing consumer-facing AI tools — like OpenAI — and firms like Salesforce making enterprise AI systems. She said consumer-facing AI systems, such as ChatGPT , face fewer restrictions than enterprise-grade products, which have to meet higher privacy standards and comply with corporate guidelines.
“What we look for is targeted, proportional, and tailored legislation,” Bahrololoumi told CNBC on Wednesday.
“There’s definitely a difference between those organizations that are operating with consumer facing technology and consumer tech, and those that are enterprise tech. And we each have different roles in the ecosystem, [but] we’re a B2B organization,” she said.
A spokesperson for the UK’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said that planned AI rules would be “highly targeted to the handful of companies developing the most powerful AI models,” rather than applying “blanket rules on the use of AI. “
That indicates that the rules might not apply to companies like Salesforce, which don’t make their own foundational models like OpenAI.
“We recognize the power of AI to kickstart growth and improve productivity and are absolutely committed to supporting the development of our AI sector, particularly as we speed up the adoption of the technology across our economy,” the DSIT spokesperson added.
Data security
Salesforce has been heavily touting the ethics and safety considerations embedded in its Agentforce AI technology platform, which allows enterprise organizations to spin up their own AI “agents” — essentially, autonomous digital workers that carry out tasks for different functions, like sales, service or marketing.
For example, one feature called “zero retention” means no customer data can ever be stored outside of Salesforce. As a result, generative AI prompts and outputs aren’t stored in Salesforce’s large language models — the programs that form the bedrock of today’s genAI chatbots, like ChatGPT.
With consumer AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude or Meta’s AI assistant, it’s unclear what data is being used to train them or where that data gets stored, according to Bahrololoumi.
“To train these models you need so much data,” she told CNBC. “And so, with something like ChatGPT and these consumer models, you don’t know what it’s using.”
Even Microsoft’s Copilot, which is marketed at enterprise customers, comes with heightened risks, Bahrololoumi said, citing a Gartner report calling out the tech giant’s AI personal assistant over the security risks it poses to organizations.
OpenAI and Microsoft were not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.
AI concerns ‘apply at all levels’
Bola Rotibi, chief of enterprise research at analyst firm CCS Insight, told CNBC that, while enterprise-focused AI suppliers are “more cognizant of enterprise-level requirements” around security and data privacy, it would be wrong to assume regulations wouldn’t scrutinize both consumer and business-facing firms.
“All the concerns around things like consent, privacy, transparency, data sovereignty apply at all levels no matter if it is consumer or enterprise as such details are governed by regulations such as GDPR,” Rotibi told CNBC via email. GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation, became law in the UK in 2018.
However, Rotibi said that regulators may feel “more confident” in AI compliance measures adopted by enterprise application providers like Salesforce, “because they understand what it means to deliver enterprise-level solutions and management support.”
“A more nuanced review process is likely for the AI services from widely deployed enterprise solution providers like Salesforce,” she added.
Bahrololoumi spoke to CNBC at Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour in London, an event designed to promote the use of the company’s new “agentic” AI technology by partners and customers.
Her remarks come after U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour refrained from introducing an AI bill in the King’s Speech, which is written by the government to outline its priorities for the coming months. The government at the time said it plans to establish “appropriate legislation” for AI, without offering further details.
After a decade of unfulfilled promises about driverless vehicles, Tesla CEO Elon Musk hyped the company’s Cybercab concept on Thursday night, showing off a low, silver two-seater with no steering wheels or pedals.
Rolling up to the stage in a Cybercab almost an hour after the company’s “We, Robot” event was supposed to begin, Musk said the company had 21 of these vehicles, and a total of 50 “autonomous” cars on-location at the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, California where Tesla hosted its invitation-only event.
Musk offered no details about exactly where Tesla plans to produce the cars, but said consumers would be able to buy a Tesla Cybercab for below $30,000. He said the company hopes to be producing the Cybercab before 2027
He also said he expects Tesla to have “unsupervised FSD” up and running in Texas and California next year in the company’s Model 3 and Model Y electric vehicles.
FSD, which stands for Full Self-Driving, is Tesla’s premium driver assistance system, available today in a “supervised” version for Tesla electric vehicles. FSD currently requires a human driver at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time. Earlier this year, Tesla tacked “supervised” onto the product name.
“It’s going to be a glorious future,” Musk said on Thursday night.
Musk also revealed plans to produce an autonomous, electric Robovan that can carry up to 20 people, or be used to transport goods. He said it will “solve for high density,” transporting a sports team, for example.
He said the Cybercab and Robovan would employ inductive charging, meaning these autonomous vehicles could roll up to a station to recharge, with no plugging in required.
Tesla unveils its RoboVan at the We, Robot event on October 10, 2024.
Musk has spent years touting Tesla’s work in autonomous cars and promising that they would hit the market. Along the way, he’s repeatedly woven a fantastical vision for shareholders, setting and missing his own deadlines.
In 2015, Musk told shareholders that Tesla cars would achieve “full autonomy” within three years. They didn’t. In 2016, Musk said a Tesla car would be able to make a cross-country drive without requiring any human intervention before the end of 2017. That never happened. And in 2019, on a call with institutional investors that would help him raise more than $2 billion, Musk said Tesla would have 1 million robotaxi-ready vehicles on the road in 2020, able to complete 100 hours of driving work per week each, making money for their owners.
In April this year, Musk was still telling investors autonomy is the company’s future.
“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla’s going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company,” he said on a call with analysts. “We will, and we are.”
At Thursday night’s event, which he previously characterized as a “product launch,” Musk welcomed attendees to the “party,” and said they would be able to take test rides in the autonomous vehicles on location, in the closed environment of the movie studio lots.
It was Tesla’s first product unveiling since the company first showed off the design for its Cybertruck in 2019. The angular steel pickup began shipping to customers in late 2023, and has been the subject of five voluntary recalls since then in the U.S.