The TeslaDeliveries fell in the last quarter after the end of electric car subsidies USA clearly fallen. The electric car pioneer delivered 418,227 vehicles to customers worldwide, which was 15.6 percent less than in the same quarter of the previous year. Tesla shares were recently down more than one percent.
This means that Tesla recorded its second consecutive decline in deliveries throughout 2025. They fell by 8.5 percent to a good 1.636 million vehicles. Tesla reached its previous peak in 2023 with just over 1.8 million cars delivered. Chinese competitor BYD, which sold 2.26 million vehicles last year, is now the largest electric vehicle manufacturer.
The US President may have played a role in the decline in the final quarter Donald Trump (79) allowed the tax break of $7,500 for the purchase of electric cars to expire at the end of September. In the third quarter, Tesla deliveries rose by 7.4 percent to 497,099 because many interested parties in the USA wanted to take the bonus with them. Now, as with other manufacturers, there was a setback.
Musk: Robotaxis and robots are the future anyway
However, company boss Elon Musk (54) downplays the importance of car sales for Tesla and claims that the company’s future will lie in self-driving robotaxis and human-like robots. In both areas, Tesla is just beginning and faces strong competition.
So far, Tesla has only used a few dozen robotaxis in the Texas city of Austin, most of which are accompanied by guards in the passenger seat. Google’s sister company Waymo, meanwhile, operates more than 2,500 driverless cars in several US cities and is expanding. Meanwhile, many Chinese companies and US companies such as Agility Robotics and Figure AI are researching humanoid robots. They are already working on using the machines in industry.
Musk’s politics and model change
The year 2025 was bumpy for Tesla. In the first few months, Musk was active in Washington as Trump’s cost-cutting agent in the government apparatus. He took a rather brutal approach and boasted, among other things, that he had thrown the development aid authority “into the wood chipper”. Because of Musk’s demeanor and his right-wing political views, some potential Tesla buyers turned away. At the beginning of the year, Tesla was also slowed down by the model change in the best-selling Model Y. Tesla’s futuristic-looking electric pickup truck Cybertruck looks like a flop.
In the USA, car buyers increasingly turned to vehicles with combustion engines and hybrid drives last year – and in Europe, other manufacturers were gaining ground in the electric car market.
At Tesla challenger Rivian, which is currently only active in North America, deliveries in the fourth quarter fell by a good 31 percent year-on-year to 9,745 vehicles. For the entire year there was a decrease of 18 percent to 42,247 cars. Rivian, a partner of VW in developing the electronics architecture of the German group’s future electric cars, wants to increase sales next year with a significantly cheaper model.