Tesla's First Quarter 2026 EV Sales: Analysts Project Modest Gains

Wall Street is expecting a Q1 sales bump for Tesla. But projections for 2026 and the rest of the decade have been sharply lowered.

2026 Tesla Model Y 7-seat version

Photo by: Tesla

Suvrat Kothari

By: Suvrat Kothari

Mar 31, at 1:35pm ET

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Wall Street has lowered Tesla's delivery projections by thousands of units for 2026 and the rest of the decade.
The company's energy storage business is expected to skyrocket during those years.
Tesla's first quarter sales, however, are expected to rebound modestly.

For the second straight quarter, Tesla has posted Wall Street analysts' sales estimates on its investor relations website, just days before its official delivery numbers drop.

The automaker shared what it called the "company-compiled delivery consensus of sell-side analysts," pulling projections from 23 financial firms, including Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Wells Fargo, and HSBC. The firms also shared their projections for Tesla’s energy storage business, which has lately been booming due to power-hungry AI data centers.

The firms are projecting modest year-over-year gains, with 351,179 combined deliveries for the Model 3 and Model Y, roughly 8% more than the official first-quarter figure from a year ago. Analysts are also forecasting 8% growth in deliveries of the Model S, Model X, and Cybertruck, at 13,946 units combined.

2026 Tesla Model 3 Standard

Photo by: Tesla

Those small year-over-year estimated gains aren't surprising once you remember what the first quarter of 2025 actually looked like. Sales took a hit from the production ramp-up of the refreshed Model Y. There were also nationwide "Tesla Takedown" protests fueled by backlash over CEO Elon Musk's role leading the Department of Government Efficiency. Those created some headwinds for Tesla. In other words, the bar for Q1 2026 wasn't especially high to begin with.

On the other hand, Wall Street's energy storage projections are much higher from 2026 through the end of the decade. Tesla’s official energy storage deployments for 2025 stood at 46.7 gigawatt-hours. Analysts expect that number to rise to 65.2 GWh this year and more than double from there to 166.1 GWh by 2030.

However, the analysts expect much more tepid growth for Tesla's EV sales over the next several years. In fact, as compared with the analyst consensus Tesla shared in Q4, the firms have lowered their delivery estimates for every year from 2026 through 2029. Last quarter, the consensus had Tesla delivering 1.75 million vehicles worldwide in 2026. That figure has since been trimmed to roughly 1.68 million, a downward revision of more than 60,000 units.

Year (Wall Street estimates) Q1 2026 Tesla EV Deliveries Projections Q4 2025 Tesla EV Deliveries Projections 2026 1,689,691 1,750,243 2027 1,880,496 2,010,459 2028 2,128,187 2,350,451 2029 2,613,623 3,019,902 2030 3,032,000 NA

It’s worth noting that there’s a very high standard deviation for these estimates, meaning the projections from each firm are spread out over a broad range. Wall Street firms also revise delivery estimates frequently, and those projections are shaped by a constantly shifting set of variables that include geopolitical tensions, supply chain constraints, federal policy, and Tesla's own product roadmap. If the next administration restores the federal EV tax credit, or if Tesla achieves a breakthrough with its Full-Self Driving (Supervised) software to drive more sales, those numbers could trend upward.

For now, Tesla is focused on scaling production of its Optimus humanoid robot and building out its robotaxi network with the upcoming Cybercab. On the passenger EV front, Musk recently teased that "something way cooler than a minivan is coming," responding to an X user who asked the automaker to make an electric minivan.

Take that with a grain of salt. Musk has a long history of ambitious promises on unpredictable timelines. But it does leave open the possibility that more Tesla EVs are in the pipeline.

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Tesla will release its official delivery numbers this Thursday. That's when we'll find out how closely the actual figures align with Wall Street's projections, and get our clearest read yet on how much the loss of the federal EV tax credit is weighing on the brand heading into the second quarter without it.

Contact the author: suvrat.kothari@insideevs.com