Speaking of TSLA, deliveries beat expectations, however they had a surplus inventory and slashed prices by a significant amount to move that putting margins at a racer thin level. Is it a wrong analysis that every single metric is maxed out and without a significant development like FSD going public, we’re looking at a crash at the next hiccup?
edit : (hiccup?
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/07/tesla-misses-deadline-to-inform-nhtsa-about-autopilot-problems/)
I don't think anyone is predicting a "crash" in future sales, but their continued projections of 50% annualized unit sales growth over the next handful of years seems highly unlikely. Right now they are winning the "price war" as other legacy manufacturers struggle to get enough batteries. And they're the only automaker outside of China (to my knowledge) that's selling a significant number of BEVs. Approx 1.8M (run rate) this year, but they had to furiously cut prices
and benefit from new U.S. subsidies. Unless the Cybertruck is an immediate smash hit (unlikely that production could ramp that quickly), 2.5M+ next year already seems like a very steep hill to climb.*
Even if I guide YoY unit growth down to 40%, that's already 3.5M vehicles in 2026 and the law of large numbers really kicks in. Since their long-term goal is to sell at least 10M autos annually, they will need more car models than they currently sell (the S & X are already niche sellers), and at lower price points.
* As a guesstimate, if they want to increase unit sales by 700k in 2024, they'd probably have to sell 400k
more Model Ys than in 2023. Or several hundred thousand Cybertrucks or some combination of both. IIRC there isn't much unit sales growth in the Model 3, but they'd have to squeeze out some increase there to achieve close to 50% annualized growth.