Tesla sold 486,532 electric vehicles during the third quarter of 2026. That’s a 2.1% decline from the same quarter of 2025, when the company found homes for 497,099 electric vehicles, and you’d think that would be bad news for a company valued on near-constant growth.
But Tesla stock is up this morning; the year-over-year numbers may look bad, but the company still beat analysts’ expectations by 456,600 cars, which would have represented a larger year-over-year decline of 8%.
Total production at Tesla has actually increased year over year; it built 464,391 vehicles, an increase of 3.7 percent, of which 457,387 were Model 3s and Ys (an increase of 4.9 percent year over year). The remaining 7,004 were other models, mostly Cybertrucks, with probably a few semis and Cybercabs, as the S and X models are now retired; this category saw a 39.8 percent year-over-year decrease.
But the company couldn’t sell all the cars it made in the third quarter. It was able to sell 478,237 Model 3 and Y models, a decrease of 0.6% compared to the third quarter of 2025. The decline of other models was severe, falling 48% to 8,295 units in total.
However, Tesla’s energy storage business had a much better three months. Between the beginning of July and the end of September, Tesla deployed 13.7 GWh of energy storage products, an increase of 9.6% year-over-year.
Tesla will report its third quarter financial results on October 21.
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