Tesla Inc’s electric vehicle sales accelerated again during the summer, but the company is still lagging behind the pace that it needs to reach CEO Elon Musk’s goal for the entire year.
The company delivered 97,000 vehicles from July to last month, more than in any other three-month period in its history. The performance increased Tesla’s sales for the first nine months of the year to nearly 255,000 vehicles.
That means that it would need to deliver about 105,000 vehicles during the final three months of the year to hit the low end of Musk’s sales target of 360,000 to 400,000 vehicles for the whole of this year.
Photo: AP
The third-quarter sales numbers announced on Wednesday fell below the average estimate of 99,000 vehicles among analysts polled by FactSet.
Tesla’s stock dropped 4 percent to US$233 after the numbers came out.
Investors are also wondering if Tesla’s steadily rising numbers would translate into the profits that have mostly eluded the company that Musk cofounded 16 years ago.
Tesla’s lowest-priced vehicle, the Model 3 sedan, remained by far its top seller during the third quarter, accounting for nearly 80,000 of the deliveries.
That is good news in the sense that it shows that Tesla is able to make an electric vehicle with a starting price of US$35,000 that appeals to a mass market.
However, it is not clear whether the company can make money on a vehicle sold at that price — something that could extend its long history of losses even as it sells more Model 3s.
The Palo Alto, California-based company has sustained more than US$6 billion in losses since its inception, but Musk has repeatedly promised during the past year that Tesla would soon be on financially solid ground.
It posted losses of more than US$1 billion during the first half of this year.
In July, Musk told analysts that Tesla would be “around breakeven” in the July-to-September period before turning a profit during the year’s final quarter.
Tesla is expected to release its financial results for the third quarter late this month or early next month.
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