Tesla (TSLA) releases Q3 deliveries: just shy of expectations

Tesla (TSLA) has released its official deliveries and production results for the third quarter of 2024. The automaker confirmed that it delivered just short of 463,000 vehicles, which was Wall Street’s expectations.

Tesla Q3 2024 Expectations

After two quarters in a row with deliveries being down year-over-year, a first for Tesla in almost a decade, Wall Street has been expecting Tesla to finally return to year-over-year growth this quarter.

Analysts have a consensus of 463,000 deliveries.

While meeting those expectations would mark a return to year-over-year for Tesla, they would be short of the 485,000 deliveries it needs to stay on track for overall delivery growth in 2024 and short of the 585,000 deliveries it needs to stay on track for its original goal of 2 million deliveries for the year.

Tesla isn’t releasing precise guidance for annual deliveries anymore.

Tesla Q3 2024 Production and Delivery Results

Before markets opened today, Tesla released its production and delivery results for the last quarter. The automaker confirmed that it produced 469,796 vehicles and delivered 462,890 vehicles between July and September 2024.

This comes literally just about a hundred vehicles under Wall Street expectations.

Tesla had been sitting on about 13,000 vehicles in over production before Q3. Now, it adds about 7,000 vehicles to that tally.

Lately, Tesla has been sharing its energy storage deployment with its quarterly automotive delivery results.

Today, Tesla confirmed that it deployed 6.9 GWh of energy storage capacity in Q3 2024.

This compares to the 9.4 GWh installed last quarter.

Electrek’s Take

Wall Street did pretty well this quarter. It was basically right on target, but the stock is down nonetheless, which is often the case when Tesla is not beating expectations.

Tesla is up about 30,000 units year-over-year or 6%, but it now will need a massive Q4 in order to not be down overall for the whole year and it would need a miracle to achieve its original goal of 2 million units.

Further, Tesla did add about 7,000 vehicles of over-production for a total of about 20,000 vehicles for the year. That’s a manageable inventory, but it is still not ideal.

If you are looking to buy a Tesla and you feared that you missed the biggest incentives in Q3, I think it’s safe to say that there will be more incentives again in Q4.