Tesla just reported its fourth consecutive quarter of declining sales, delivering 418,227 vehicles in Q4 2025 - a 15.6% drop from last year and a significant miss against Wall Street's 422,850 vehicle forecast. For a company that's spent years promising acceleration in AI-powered robotaxis and humanoid robots, the numbers reveal a company increasingly struggling with an aging lineup, rising competition from legacy automakers, and the loss of the federal EV tax credit that once fueled demand.
Tesla's earnings bombshell arrived on Friday morning, and it's everything Wall Street feared. The company missed its Q4 delivery target by roughly 4,600 vehicles, but the story is way bigger than one bad quarter. We're watching a company stuck in a sales spiral while its CEO places massive bets on technology that's still years away from mattering.
The numbers tell a grim story. Tesla produced 434,358 vehicles in Q4 2025, a 5.8% decline year-over-year. For the full year, the company churned out 1,654,667 vehicles across all models, down 6.7% compared to 2024. That means two straight years of declining production at a company that's supposed to be a growth juggernaut. Most of those deliveries were Model 3s and Model Ys - the company's bread and butter. Everything else is struggling.
Take the Cybertruck. When Tesla started delivering the polarizing electric pickup in late 2023, it was supposed to be a revolution. Instead, sales have completely flatlined. The company reported delivering only 11,642 vehicles in the "other" category - which includes the Model S, Model X, and Cybertruck combined - down a staggering 50.7% from Q4 2024. Tesla doesn't break out exact Cybertruck figures, so we can't know the exact damage, but the math suggests the truck that Elon Musk championed as a next-generation vehicle is basically dead on arrival.
What happened? The culprit is a perfect storm. Rising competition from legacy automakers like Ford, General Motors, and Chinese EV makers has flooded the market with cheaper alternatives just as 's tax incentives disappeared. The federal EV tax credit that once subsidized purchases expired, removing a major reason for consumers to choose over competitors. And then there's the Elon factor. Musk's emergence as a divisive political figure - pushing conspiracy theories on his social media platform X and heading the DOGE project in the Trump administration - has alienated many of 's traditionally liberal customer base, the core constituency that built the brand into what it is today.
