Tesla smashed delivery expectations. Changing U.S. electric-vehicle policies no doubt helped produce a big "beat," but the results were pretty darn good no matter how you look at them.
In the third quarter, Tesla delivered 497,099 cars, a record for any quarter. Deliveries rose 29% from the 384,122 vehicles in the second quarter, and were up 7.4% from 462,890 vehicles in the third quarter of 2024.
The company returned to growth after two consecutive quarters of decline. Through September, Tesla has delivered 1,217,902 cars this year, down 5.9% over the same span of 2024.
The surge likely was because the $7,500 federal purchase tax credit for qualifying electric vehicles expired at the end of the third quarter, as specified under President Donald Trump's tax-and-spending bill, which became law in July.
Changing policy made predictions tough. Wall Street wasn't even close. The company-compiled Wall Street consensus number was about 443,000 deliveries. Tesla beat that by more than 54,000 vehicles.
Others had higher estimates. Tesla managed to eclipse those, too. Future Fund Active ETFs co-founder Gary Black estimated deliveries of 470,000 vehicles, citing Ford Motor's strong EV sales. Ford sold 11,712 EVs in September, up 85% year over year.
A Tesla researcher referenced by Wall Street, Troy Teslike, projected deliveries of 481,000 vehicles. Strong U.S. sales and improving European sales data have caused him to increase his estimates by some 40,000 units over the past few weeks. He was the closest. The top estimate on FactSet was 480,000 vehicles.
The stock's ascent over the past month indicates how the market is forward-looking. Tesla shares rose 33% in September, largely due to rising expectations for third-quarter sales.
Investors welcomed the deliveries beat, but predicting how the stock will move is never easy. Shares declined 5.1% to $436 on Thursday. The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average were up slightly.
Tesla stock dropped 6.1% on Jan. 2, after the company reported fourth-quarter deliveries of 495,570 vehicles, a record for the company at the time. Tesla stock had risen more than 60% in the two months leading up to the delivery report.
Shares gained 5.3% on April 2 after the company reported first-quarter deliveries of 336,681. That number missed analysts' estimates by a wide margin, sparking fears that CEO Elon Musk's close association with Republican President Trump was turning off core Tesla buyers -- politically left-leaning people looking to go green. But that was also the day reports surfaced that Musk would leave his position in the administration.
Tesla stock rose 5% on July 2, after the company reported deliveries of 384,122 vehicles. The number was close to the analyst consensus, but the 13.5% year-over-year decline was the largest in the company's history. Tesla delivered about 721,000 cars in the first half of 2025, down 13% from the year-ago period.
Coming into Thursday trading, Tesla stock has risen 52% over the past three months, 14% this year, and 78% over the past 12 months. EV deliveries aren't responsible for the rally. Instead, investors are increasingly focused on the company's artificial-intelligence opportunities. Tesla launched an AI-trained robo-taxi service in Austin, Texas, in June, and plans to expand it across the country as quickly as possible. It also plans to start selling significant quantities of AI-trained humanoid robots in 2026.
The AI potential has driven several price target increases on Wall Street, including hikes from RBC, Baird, and Wedbush. The average analyst price target for Tesla stock is about $347 a share, up $33 since the end of August, according to FactSet.
Wedbush analysts wrote Thursday that Tesla could reach a $2 trillion market cap by early 2026 in a bull-case scenario, and $3 trillion by the end of 2026 "as full scale volume production begins of the autonomous and robotics roadmap."
AI might be the future, but the car business still pays the bills, allowing Tesla to spend billions of dollars buying Nvidia chips.
With the third-quarter numbers in the books, investors' attention will turn to the fourth quarter. How that will turn out without the $7,500 federal EV purchase tax credit is anyone's guess. The current consensus estimate is 465,000 vehicles sold, according to FactSet, down from the 495,570 sold in the final quarter of 2024.
There are other developments also worth monitoring. Cantor Fitzgerald analysts styled the upcoming lower-priced Tesla, often referred to as the Model 2, as a potential catalyst. The model is set to be priced at around $30,000, including tax credits, Cantor estimated.
The firm expects Tesla to enter the self-driving trucking industry with mass production of the Semi Truck next year, echoing claims from Musk himself, who wrote on social media in August that the Semi would be "in volume production" in 2026. The truck was unveiled in 2017 and has only been delivered to a handful of customers since then.