- After many years of gains, Tesla sales and deliveries dropped
- Tesla’s share of the U.S. EV market has fallen below 50%
- U.S. registration figures are yet to come
Tesla sales and deliveries turned downward in 2024, after a seemingly unstoppable trajectory of double-digit gains for many years.
Globally, Tesla delivered about 1,789,226 million vehicles in all of 2024, with production of about 1,773,443 million vehicles. Both of those figures are down versus the reported 1,808,581 deliveries and 1,845,985 vehicles made in 2023.
That’s just over a 1% drop in deliveries in 2024 and a nearly 4% drop in production for the year. And it might have been worse without a rally in the fourth quarter. Tesla noted that it posted a delivery record for Q4, at 495,570 vehicles.
To compare, a year ago Tesla was touting some very different results. Its 2023 deliveries and sales grew 38% and 35%, respectively, over 2022. Tesla’s 2023 sales surge was strong, and its sales numbers exceeded 2022 numbers every single month of the year according to DOE data. That said, China’s BYD continued to edge up on Tesla on the global front in 2023.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Cybercab event (screenshot) – Oct. 2024
In 2023, Tesla CEO Elon Musk became political and by extension so did Tesla in a way it never had been before. By April 2024, reputational studies were showing the relationship, as even more of the American car-buying public connected Tesla with Musk. At this point, it’s hard to ignore an array of consumer-sentiment data points suggesting that the world’s richest man may be getting in the way of Tesla sales growth, especially in California, where it’s held more than a tenth of the new-vehicle market.
Tesla’s share of the EV market shrank in 2023 despite price cuts, to around 50% of the U.S. EV market, and with 2024 EV sales expected to rise overall by about 20% versus 2023, it will certainly lose more of that in 2024. Tesla had continued those price cuts in 2024, with an April move that repositioned the Model Y below the Model 3, thanks to the federal EV tax credit that Musk has backed eliminating.
The Model 3 and Model Y composed the vast majority of Tesla’s global total. Just 94,105 of its global production and 85,133 of its global deliveries were of “other models”—likely including the Model S, Model X, Cybertruck, and Semi.
2024 Tesla Model Y. – Courtesy of Tesla, Inc.
As a footnote to this: It’s not yet clear whether Tesla saw sales sputter in the same way in the U.S., looking at the entire year. Through October they were down, however. Citing registration-based figures through that month, Automotive News tallied 499,870 sales through that month, versus 535,834 for the equivalent period in 2023.
Tesla doesn’t report U.S.-market sales figures, which generally rely on state registration numbers and their commensurate lag. But we’ll have an idea on those, and whether Tesla managed to achieve U.S. sales gains for the year, within a few weeks.