The stock market remains undefeated in frustrating investors. Tesla’s delivery results are the latest example.
Tesla reported exceptional second-quarter delivery results on Thursday. They just weren’t exceptional enough for the stock.
Thursday morning, the electric-vehicle maker reported second-quarter deliveries of 480,126 vehicles, up from 384,122 a year ago. Wall Street was looking for about 406,000 vehicles.
Tesla stock was down 5.47%, at $402.03, in early trading, while the S&P 500 was up 0.7% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.9%.
The stock might not be up because investors were expecting good news. Coming into the report, shares were up 12% for the week, seemingly rising alongside expectations of a positive delivery number.
More recent Wall Street estimates, including those from Barclays and JPMorgan, were in the range of 420,000. What’s more, prominent Tesla forecaster Troy Teslike projected 466,000 cars sold.
“Investors [are] selling the news,” says Future Fund Active ETF co-founder Gary Black. The stock market is forward-looking, and share prices often react in advance of the data.
Still, 480,000-plus vehicles sold is better than anyone expected, and should have been enough to keep investors happy.
Energy storage deployments of 13.5 gigawatt-hours were better than the first quarter’s 8.8 gigawatt-hours. “The pace of growth for Tesla’s energy storage business has tempered,” wrote William Blair analyst Jed Dorsheimer on Thursday. “But our view of the demand environment has not changed; [Tesla] Megapacks continue to be critical to the AI data center and power buildout.”
Tesla delivered about 384,000 cars in the second quarter of 2025. Investors were looking for growth, which has eluded the EV maker for a while. Annual deliveries peaked in 2023 at about 1.8 million cars, then fell in 2024 and 2025. Tesla is expected to grow EV deliveries in 2026, selling about 1.7 million cars, up from about 1.6 million in 2025.
Reasons for the slowdown include Tesla deciding against introducing an all-new, lower-priced EV, and the loss of the $7,500 federal EV purchase tax credit in September, which made EVs less affordable for American car buyers. Offsetting some of the headwinds in the second quarter was the rise in gasoline costs. Benchmark prices reached $4.60 a gallon in May, up about $1.60 after the war in Iran disrupted global oil supplies.
Tesla’s EV business generates most of the company’s sales and earnings, but investors have been focused more on AI lately. Tesla launched an AI-trained robo-taxi service in Austin, Texas, about a year ago. Today, it operates in a few cities, but the business is not generating significant sales or earnings. Investors are also keen to see the latest version of Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus.
AI will continue to move the stock in the coming months. Still, no one will complain about a rebound in Tesla’s EV business.
Next up for Tesla investors is the second-quarter earnings report, due on July 22.
