Tesla’s Deliveries Spike 25% in Q2, despite End of Federal EV Incentives, as Gasoline Prices Soared. Shares Plunge

But forget the Model S and X, and the Cybertruck.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

The total number of vehicles that Tesla delivered to customers around the globe in Q2 2026 spiked by 25.0% year-over-year, to 480,126 vehicles, a record for Q2. Compared to Q2 2024, deliveries rose by 8.1%; and compared to Q2 2023, by 3.0% (red line in the chart).

That growth came from the Model Y and Model 3, whose deliveries jumped by 25.2% year-over-year to 467,762 (blue line in the chart). This growth was driven by the spike in gasoline prices globally and occurred despite the end of the US federal EV incentives last September. Customers front-ran the end of the federal incentives, which caused EV sales in the US to spike through September 30 and plunge after September 30.

“Other Models” – Model S, Model X, Cybertruck, and now the Semi heavy truck – rose year-over-year by 19.0% from what had been the lowest Q2 since Q2 2021, to a still abysmally low 12,364 (green line at the bottom of the chart).

Tesla had officially ended production of the Model S and Model X by early May, and that final production run appears to be sold out, with Tesla no longer showing any availability on its website.

The much-hyped Cybertruck has remained a dud, except with SpaceX, which purchased $131 million of them in 2025, accounting for about 8% of total Cybertruck sales in the US, according to the S-1 pre-IPO filing of SpaceX.

In 2023, Tesla said it expected to be able to ramp production of the Cybertruck to 250,000 units in 2025. Maybe it could produce that many, but it couldn’t sell anywhere near that many, not even including those sold to SpaceX. For the whole year 2025, deliveries of “other” models (Cybertruck, Model S, and Model X) collapsed by 40% to just 50,850 units, as the Cybertruck became one of the auto industry’s most famous failed models.

The Semi has now entered mass-production at the new plant in Sparks, Nevada. The prior units were sold under a limited small-scale pilot program that companies like PepsiCo tested. Mass production will gradually ramp up.

Looking at the “other” models – Cybertruck, Model S, Model X, and Semi – under the magnifying glass:

Tesla’s shares [TSLA] re-plunged this morning by over 7%, to $395 a share at the moment, down by 21% from the high in December, on the news of the deliveries, which blew by Wall Street estimates, or despite the news, or on the perception that Tesla is now a humanoid robot company, and even less an automaker than it was before, and perhaps on the perception that the Optimus, which is now entering production at Tesla’s former Model S/X factory in Fremont, California, is lining up to be another immensely hyped product that turns into a dud with consumers.

And Tesla’s robotaxis are where Alphabet’s Waymo was about two years ago. Only Waymo doesn’t bother to build cars, it is focused on the self-driving technology and leaves the building of cars to others.

Tesla is a phenomenal hype machine, and so its shares trade at a P/E ratio of 361, despite the recent decline, when automakers listed in the US usually trade in the 10-20 range, including Toyota with a P/E ratio of 10, GM with a P/E ratio of 30, and Ford with a P/E ratio of N/A as it had a blistering loss of $8.2 billion in 2025.