How Many Sales Will Tesla Have in 2025?

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Okay, the story has been repeated enough: Tesla was supposed to be achieving 50% growth per year through 2030, yet sales actually declined year over year in 2024. Some Tesla fans want us to be positive about that, but even beyond the fact that sales didn’t match the longer-term forecast of 50% growth a year, they also didn’t match Elon Musk’s forecast from early 2024 that the company would achieve sales growth across the full year (something he said while discussing the company’s steep Q1 sales decline). If someone told these Tesla fans in 2023 that the company’s sales would decline in 2024, that person would be attacked and criticized, with all kinds of reasons why that wasn’t true and the person was just a hater. So, no one should be spinning 2024’s sales results as good or as expected. Also, if we’re being frank, we have to admit that it’s anyone’s guess how many vehicles will be sold in the coming year, or years. Elon Musk said as much last year when he was asked about more details on the company’s long-term projections.

All of that said, I was quite bearish on Tesla 2024 sales because the company was showing strong signs of consumer demand challenges starting in mid-2023. Again, Tesla fans hated these articles and claimed I was wrong, but when Tesla is offering more and more incentives and discounts, and getting a bit extreme with them, to stimulate consumer demand, it’s obvious that sales are not at the desired level. I was quite good at forecasting Tesla sales for several years, and I wasn’t blinded by fanaticism to see a changing trend. I bring this up because I think people — across the board — need to be a little more (or in some cases a lot more) open to looking at the reality of the situation rather than assuming what they’d like to see or assuming the narrative of this year is going to be the same as the narrative of previous years.

With all of that out of the way, what can we expect from 2025 when it comes to Tesla?

This is one year in which I really don’t know what to expect. There are four wildcards, and they are each extremely hard to have solid feelings about. Here are those wildcards and my take on them:

1. Model Y (and Model 3) sales following refresh: The Tesla Model Y is just undergoing its big refresh, while the Model 3 is getting pretty deep into its — to the point that it’s hard to still call it a refresh. The big question is how much this will do for sales. Will the Model Y “Juniper” stimulate a lot more sales, or is it not big enough of a change to make consumers care — to make existing owners upgrade or to stimulate more new buyers than would come in anyway? Regarding the Model 3, which hasn’t seen a big boost from the refresh, will its sales stagnate or even drop now? There seems like a high likelihood of that. Also, while the Model Y Juniper is new, there are dozens of exciting new EV models in China, and several of them look even more exciting to me. Tesla relies on China for nearly half of its sales, so what happens if more of the market there starts to see the Model Y and Model 3 as less compelling than models from BYD, XPENG, NIO, Zeekr, Li Auto, and others? And what about Europe and the US, where Elon Musk’s high political engagement is turning off a lot of people who would normally be Tesla fans? In case you can’t tell, I’m waffling here and struggling to see which way the wind is blowing. Pushing myself to make a call, I’m going to go bold and say that the Model Y and Model 3 will see their annual sales decline a little in 2025. That may be a crazy call considering the Model Y is getting updated, and that key factor does make me think I could very well be eating my words, but with sales already at a very high level going into an increasingly competitive market and the challenges noted above, I feel like this may be more likely than most of us have been willing to think. Okay, I’ll just go with 1.7 million sales in 2025.
2. Cybertruck sales: Tesla should continue to ramp up production, make production more efficient, and drive down Cybertruck costs. It seems like the reservation backlog is gone, though, and that seems premature even to those of us who were skeptical about the supposedly enormous reservation list. I was initially inclined to say sales would increase a bit, perhaps to 50,000, but I’m now thinking they could just be stagnant (especially thinking about that reservation list dissipating and the Model Y refresh arriving). I’m going to go ahead with a forecast of 35,000 sales.
3. Model Q? We don’t even know what some supposedly new model will be named or what car class it will be, so this is an especially hard one to forecast for. David and I talk about this for a while in the video below, but we have no clear answers. I’m going to go out on a limb and expect very little from this model in 2025. Put me down for 10,000 initial sales even though I’m more inclined to think production doesn’t even begin in 2025.
4. Full Self Driving/robotaxis: The giant wildcard year after year, will Tesla crack the robotaxi nut this year and see a huge surge in demand for its vehicles? Well, if you haven’t yet deduced my answer from the numbers above, let’s just say I expect 2025 will be similar to previous years — a lot of hype, a lot of promises, and no mass-scale robotaxi deployment from Tesla. I think the company will launch “trials” and pilot programs in California and Texas, enough to keep the hype going and the stock price up (maybe), but not enough to significantly change consumer demand. Will this be the year skeptics are proven wrong and Tesla gets back to its 50% growth target? I think not, but we’ll see — it’s possible.

I also talked about these matters with David Havasi in the following video:

What are your thoughts on these matters, and what do you expect from Tesla in 2025?

For more on recent Tesla sales, see: