Tesla Sales Fall For A Second Straight Year

The automaker’s 2025 sales looked grim amid growing competition and the end of the federal tax credits.

Tesla Model Y Performance (2025) in European specification

Photo by: Tesla

Suvrat Kothari

By: Suvrat Kothari

Jan 2, at 10:34am ET

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Tesla's fourth quarter and full-year deliveries fell sharply last year.
The Cybertruck, Model X and Model S witnessed an even bigger drop as the Model Y and Model 3 continued to account for the lion's share of its sales.
BYD has surpassed Tesla as the world's largest EV maker.

Tesla announced its fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 sales on Friday, reporting a larger-than-expected decline as it now faces a new reality of intensifying competition and no tax credits to boost demand.

The automaker reported 418,227 global deliveries in the final quarter of last year, a 15.6% year-over-year drop. The Model Y and Model 3 continued to be the bread-and-butter products for the company, accounting for 406,585 deliveries in the fourth quarter.

Its annual sales fell from 1.78 million in 2024 to 1.63 million last year, marking an 8.5% drop and a second straight year of declining sales. Tesla sales peaked in 2023 with over 1.8 million deliveries, but the automaker has since struggled to keep that momentum going amid its pivot to AI and robotics and a stale model line-up.

Q4 2025 results Production Deliveries Model Y/3 422,652 406,585 Cybertruck, Model X/Model S 11,706 11,642 Total 434,358 418,227

Tesla doesn’t report region-specific sales, but these numbers were also hurt by the end of the $7,500 federal tax credit in the U.S. and heavily revised fuel economy rules that now favor combustion engine models over EVs.

Deliveries of “other models,” which include the Cybertruck, Model X and the Model S, also more than halved in the fourth quarter. Tesla sold only 11,642 units of these three EVs in Q4 of last year, representing just about 2.8% of its global deliveries during that period.

Annual deliveries of these other models plummeted by a staggering 40% to just over 50,000 units, accounting for just about 3.1% of its 1.63 million global sales. Tesla expected to sell over 200,000 units of the Cybertruck at one point, but that goal failed to materialize due to a lack of demand and a raft of problems.

Full Year 2025 results Production Deliveries Model Y/3 1,600,767 1,585,279 Cybertruck, Model X/Model S 53,900 50,850 Total 1,654,667 1,636,129

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BYD, on the other hand, is now the world’s largest EV maker, surpassing Tesla last year with 2.26 million sales of its battery-powered cars, an impressive 28% growth. And Tesla is expected to face even more competition in 2026 with a full range of affordable as well as premium high-tech models lined up from General Motors, Mercedes-Benz and BMW, among others.

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