Tesla is due to report third-quarter production and delivery figures Friday, and for once Wall Street genuinely does not agree on what the number will look like. Analyst estimates compiled ahead of the report range from 421,758 vehicles at the low end, from Cantor Fitzgerald, to 482,000 at the high end, from JPMorgan — a spread of roughly 60,000 vehicles that traders following the stock describe as unusually wide. Tesla's own company-compiled consensus, which pools estimates from 24 analysts including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Barclays, lands at 461,974 vehicles and 15.9 gigawatt-hours of energy storage deployments.
Every one of those scenarios represents a year-over-year decline. Tesla delivered a record 497,099 vehicles in the third quarter of 2025, a figure inflated by buyers rushing to close purchases before the federal $7,500 clean-vehicle tax credit expired on September 30 of that year. With no credit to pull demand forward this time, deliveries slipped to 480,126 in the second quarter of 2026, and the comparison gets tougher still against last year's rush-driven peak.
Weak monthly data fed the estimate cuts
Several banks trimmed their forecasts sharply in the days before the report after monthly sales data came in soft. Tesla's U.S. sales reportedly fell 26% year-over-year to around 40,816 vehicles in August, while retail sales in China dropped 12.4% to about 50,047 units, prompting JPMorgan to cut its estimate from 516,000 and Goldman Sachs to lower its figure from 490,000 to 435,000. The size of those revisions, arriving so close to the report, is itself a sign of how little confidence banks have in their own models this quarter.
That caution is not without recent precedent. Wall Street's collective estimate missed Tesla's actual second-quarter delivery count by roughly 74,000 vehicles, an error large enough to make this quarter's consensus look more like a wide guess than a forecast. Investors will get the real number before trading opens, with the stock historically among the most volatile in the S&P 500 in the hours after a delivery report, particularly when the figure falls outside the range analysts had been expecting.
