Tesla’s investor relations page posted its company-compiled consensus for the third quarter on Tuesday, September 29, with 24 sell-side analysts expecting 461,974 vehicle deliveries, a number that would be down 7.1% from a year ago and sets the bar Tesla needs to clear when it reports on Friday.
This is the fourth consensus release since Tesla started publishing them in December 2025. The median estimate comes in at 463,406 and the standard deviation is 22,659, or 4.9% of the mean. Since Tesla averages each line separately, the model estimates add up to 461,997, which is 23 more than the total.
The drop from last year comes down to a tough comparison, since Tesla delivered a record 497,099 vehicles in Q3 2025 as US buyers rushed to buy before the $7,500 federal EV tax credit expired on September 30, 2025. The new estimate is also 3.8% below the 480,126 vehicles Tesla delivered in Q2 2026, when analysts had expected 406,024 and Tesla beat them by more than 74,000 vehicles, an 18.3% beat. That Q2 release had the tightest spread of any consensus so far.
Analysts expect 450,712 deliveries of the Model 3 and Model Y, 6.3% fewer than the 481,166 delivered a year earlier. All other models, including the Cybertruck, are pegged at 11,285, down 8.7% from Q2 and 29.2% from a year ago. On the energy side, analysts see a record 15.9 GWh of storage deployed, up 27% year over year and ahead of the 14.2 GWh record from Q4 2025.
The consensus has a mixed track record so far. In Q4 2025, Tesla delivered 418,227 vehicles, missing by 1.1% (4,623 vehicles). Q1 2026 deliveries of 358,023 landed 2.1% under consensus, and storage hit 8.8 GWh against 14.4 GWh expected. Then came the big Q2 beat, after which CFO Vaibhav Taneja said on the July 22 earnings call that Tesla “exited Q2 with our largest order backlog since 2023.”
Analysts also raised their full-year 2026 delivery consensus to 1,767,255, up from 1,654,808 in June. With 838,149 vehicles delivered in the first half, that points to about 467,100 in Q4, 11.7% more than a year earlier. If Tesla gets there, 2026 deliveries would rise 8% over 2025’s 1,636,129, the first annual increase since 2023. The 2026 storage consensus slipped to 56.5 GWh, down from 57.9 GWh in June and 65.2 GWh in March, though that’s still 21% above the 46.7 GWh deployed in 2025 and implies about 18.3 GWh in Q4.
When Tesla posts its actual Q3 production and delivery numbers on Friday, October 2, the question is whether that Q2 backlog carried over enough to push past 461,974, and whether storage can finally hit a record after coming up short of expectations in each of the last two quarters.
Want to see more of our stories on Google?
P.S. — Buying a new Tesla? Click here to save $1,000 USD, while supporting independent news.
Help support us by shopping on Amazon here.
Links in this post are affiliate links, so we earn a tiny commission at no charge to you. Thanks for supporting independent media!
