In the waning days of the rebate program, it seems Tesla over-reported the number of cars it sold. Across four different Tesla dealerships in Canada, the company claimed it sold over 8,600 vehicles in three days. Since each EV sold earned a $5,000 rebate while the program was active, this resulted in over CAD 43.1 million headed Tesla’s way.
Mathematically, this means Tesla would have been selling 120 cars per hour—yes, two Teslas sold every minute—across all four dealerships, including the hours those Tesla dealerships were closed. That’s two Teslas sold every minute, 24 hours a day, for three straight days.
Reported net income down 71%, operating margin down from 5.5% to 2.1%, growth forecast scrapped, 2 months to go for next model, China market share in decline, big dependencies on imported Chinese batteries, major tariff risks not yet materialised…
Musk should step down (which I think will never happen) if Tesla wants to try to recover brand reputation. There are a huge number of people that will not consider buying a Tesla now worldwide due to politics, and the MAGA crowd often rejects EV’s.
They had poor sales in Q1 of last year, and it really wasn’t until mid quarter when the DOGE nonsense started affecting sales.
The sold 337k vehicles in Q1 compared with 495k in Q4. The prior two Q1s were ~420k and 390k. So call it a 70k sales decrease over a 7 week period. That’s going to be closer to a 260k normalized rate for the entire quarter.
I’ll give you “many will change their minds”. “Most” might be a stretch.
I will never voluntarily do business with a Musk company, even though a year ago there were several products of his that I was considering for the future, even if the alternative in one case would be “go without”.
(Occasionally I look at real estate where wired internet is not available…)
Tesla was the only game in town in terms of quality long range vehicles for years, but other manufacturers are there now. I’m not sure there’s a price that includes a reasonable profit margin that would bring many buyers back at the moment. If he drops price enough to sell vehicles at a massive loss he might encourage some recalcitrant shoppers to return. He’ll make it up on volume.
My friend that is a long time EV fan and early EV adopter can’t wait to get rid of his swasticar by gifting it to his kid when kiddo graduates college and friend gets his new vehicle. His wife already de-badged it.
I believe that that’s the case as well. But the odometers running fast on cars that need service was for sedans. And the self driving issues are universal
Similar to how many never Trumpers have become MAGA fanboys, I’m seeing many MAGA never EVers changing their tune to be open to the possibility of buying a Tesla because of Musk and DOGE.
Probably not enough to replace those becoming never Muskivites or going to the competition though.
Speaking to some US colleagues, their Teams meetings are being monitored by AI and they’re apparently being restricted on where they can do online meetings from.