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As Steve Hanley explained earlier today, Tesla has published Wall Street analyst estimates of Tesla vehicle deliveries and energy storage deployments for the first time ever on its investor relations site. These are consensus estimates from 20 Wall Street firms combined.
When I first saw news of this, I thought Tesla was also including estimates in order to try to shift the Wall Street narrative, which I thought was exceptionally weird and suspect. However, more reasonably, there are no estimates or forecasts from Tesla here. It’s just what analysts, as one big group, are expecting.
My question is: Why is Tesla now sharing this? After more than a decade on the stock market, why is Tesla doing this all of a sudden?
A few ideas come to mind. For one, it could be that Tesla thinks these estimates are very, very wrong, and wants them documented for when Tesla proves them wrong. If the analysts are expecting 422,850 4th quarter deliveries, as they are, and Tesla makes 450,000, perhaps Elon Musk wants this clearly documented so that he can rub it in their faces. If they are estimating 1,750,243 deliveries in 2026, as they are, and Tesla reached 2 million, Musk can say, “Told you so! You were so wrong!” That does seem like a very Elon thing to do.
On that note, though, I do think it’s worth quoting the following comment from “Matthew2312” under Steve’s article:
“In early 2023 (first Tesla sales miss) Musk said sales would be:2023 — 2 million2024 — 3 million2025 — 4.5 million
“(And just a note for historical amusement: In April 2022 ARK (Cathy Wood) research forecast 10 million (“bear case”) to 17 million (“Bull”) in 2026 Even funnier: in 2020 they predicted that 2025 would have $176B in EBITDA. (It is estimated around $13B.) They had forecast $70 billion in earnings from robotaxis alone…)”
Yes, if anyone’s been wrong regarding Tesla sales forecasts, it’s been Elon Musk and Cathie Wood.
Tesla is reportedly getting production of its Cybercabs underway. So, perhaps Musk thinks everything is about to turn upward again. He is eager to activate and push out robotaxis, even as critics continue to point out the weakness of the cars’ only sensors (cameras) in various weather and sunlight conditions. But he has also made ridiculously bad forecasts about Full Self Driving, robotaxis, and sales for more than a decade now.
A second possibility is that the company’s investment team simply wants to share this information more broadly. Bloomberg noted that this kind of thing has long been shared with certain parties. Why not just share it with the whole public, right? That’s a much more bland potential explanation, but it has to be a top option.
A third option, perhaps, is that Tesla wants to lower expectations. Some organizations, like Bloomberg, have significantly higher sales forecasts for Tesla. Maybe the company doesn’t want those higher forecasts to be overhyped, leading to investor disappointment and stock sales.
Who knows? Any other ideas? Are there some obvious explanations that I’m missing? Is there any significance to Tesla starting to share this information with the public now?
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