Tesla’s robotaxi future can’t come soon enough
Tesla is starting off the year on the back foot, notching its seventh consecutive day in the red as of Friday, as the company deals with a string of rough luck and bad news.
The crux of the issue last week was Q4 deliveries, which fell 16% to 418,227 vehicles, falling short of estimates, while its full-year numbers dropped 8.5% to 1,636,129, marking the electric vehicle company’s second annual sales decline in a row.
The worst part is that Tesla is losing ground in a business that is otherwise doing splendidly. Chinese competitor BYD saw its 2025 battery electric vehicle sales increase 28% to 2.3 million, overtaking Tesla for the first time on a calendar year basis.
CEO Elon Musk has been deemphasizing Tesla’s EV business, focusing the future of the company instead on autonomy, AI, and robots.
On the company’s last earnings call, Musk said Tesla is so confident in the future success of its Full Self-Driving technology that it planned to increase vehicle production “as fast as we reasonably can,” potentially reaching a 3 million annualized production rate within two years.
The Takeaway
It’s a tough time to be in the Tesla business, and backers are mainly buckling in for a bumpy ride that they believe will ultimately end with the automaker successfully diversifying into robotics and autonomous vehicles.
Still, it’s really rocky these days. Just last week it came out that South Korea’s L&F Co., a supplier of battery material for Tesla’s “apocalypse-proof” Cybertruck, has written down the value of its Tesla contract by more than 99%, Bloomberg reported — another sign that Cybertruck sales are faltering. L&F cited changes in supply quantities, slashing a contract valued at nearly $3 billion in 2023 to about $7,000 now. That’s rough!
Cybertruck was never convincing to me. I had some friends who thought it looked cool (most didn't), but even the ones that liked it weren't gonna shell out the cash for it.
TBH, I don't see American companies outcompeting China in the next two decades. Chinese graduate students are usually the best, and they have much more human capital for technology and manufacturing now. The best American minds have been occupied with playing fiat games for the last 30 years.
I'm exactly in that subset: I love the Cybertruck's looks for some reason, enjoy its stupid overwrought impracticality, but would never drop that much dough on something so frivolous. Plus I'd have no faith that I could get parts once it's inevitably discontinued.
I also wonder how much of the sales slump comes from alienating vast swathes on both sides of the political spectrum. Not sure who the modal Tesla customer is these days aside from Elon fanatics, and there's only so many of those.