Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles in the third quarter, down 2.1% from a record a year earlier and above the 461,974 that analysts had expected, according to a consensus compiled by the company.
The company produced 464,391 vehicles in the quarter, it said in a statement on Friday.
Deliveries were 1.3% above the 480,126 of the second quarter.
Tesla deployed 13.7 gigawatt-hours of energy storage, below the 15.9 GWh analysts had expected but still the company’s second best result ever.
Against the Consensus
The consensus Tesla published on Tuesday averaged the estimates of 24 analysts, with a median of 463,406 and a standard deviation of 22,659. Tesla beat the mean by 24,558 vehicles, or 5.3%.
It is the fourth quarter for which the company has published such a consensus, and it beat the previous one by a wide margin, delivering 480,126 vehicles in the second quarter against an expected 406,024.
It fell short of the first two, by 1.1% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and by 2.1% in the first quarter of 2026.
Individual forecasts had moved lower during September, with Goldman Sachs cutting its estimate to 435,000 from 490,000, UBS forecasting 470,000 and Cantor Fitzgerald expecting 421,758.
All three were below the figure Tesla reported.
A Record Base
The comparison is with the third quarter of 2025, when Tesla delivered a record 497,099 vehicles as US buyers rushed to claim the $7,500 federal EV tax credit before it expired on September 30.
The figures are global, and Tesla builds and sells cars in the United States, China and Europe, so the year-on-year change cannot be read as a US tax-credit effect alone.
Cox Automotive forecast Tesla’s US sales at 123,880 in the quarter, down 31% from 179,525 a year earlier.
Tesla produced 447,450 vehicles in that quarter, 49,649 fewer than it delivered.
In the latest quarter, deliveries exceeded production by 22,141, after exceeding it by 28,368 in the second quarter.
By Model
Model 3 and Model Y accounted for 478,237 deliveries, 0.6% fewer than the 481,166 of a year earlier and compared with an expected 450,712.
Other models, a category that includes the Cybertruck, accounted for 8,295, against 12,364 in the second quarter, 15,933 a year earlier and an expected 11,285.
The two expected figures add up to 461,997, or 23 more than the consensus for total deliveries, in the table Tesla published.
Tesla does not report the Cybertruck, the Model S or the Model X separately. The company also does not break down deliveries by region.
The Year So Far
Tesla delivered 358,023 vehicles in the first quarter and 480,126 in the second.
That takes deliveries in the first nine months to 1,324,681, 8.8% above the 1,217,902 of the same period of 2025.
The same analysts expect 1,767,255 deliveries for the full year, which would be 8.0% above the 1,636,129 of 2025.
Reaching that figure would require 442,574 deliveries in the fourth quarter, against 418,227 a year earlier.
Tesla has not given its own delivery forecast for 2026.
Energy Storage
Storage deployments of 13.7 GWh compare with 13.5 GWh in the second quarter and 12.5 GWh a year earlier.
The estimate of 15.9 GWh is the mean of 19 analysts, with a median of 16.2 GWh.
The record is 14.2 GWh, set in the fourth quarter of 2025.
Analysts expect 56.5 GWh for the full year.
In Washington State
Washington had 122,981 Teslas registered as of August 31, according to the state Department of Licensing, whose data does not yet cover September.
That was 50.9% of the 241,724 battery electric vehicles registered in the state, compared with 9,817 for Rivian, or 4.1%.
The Model Y accounted for 66,545 of them and the Model 3 for 39,391, followed by the Model S with 7,873, the Model X with 7,177 and the Cybertruck with 1,954.
Tesla will report third-quarter financial results on Wednesday, October 21, after the market closes, with a webcast at 5:30 p.m. Eastern Time.
