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Comment by gregncheese | Hacker News Reader

I am honestly surprised that it's only 13% and not more. Is it because January was "normal"?

It is because most of this was expected, even without turmoil. Model Y transitioned from the previous design to an updated design, leading to factory downtimes and a near complete sellout for this quarter. That one model represents ~2/3rds of Tesla sales volume. They kept sellable Model Y inventory to nearly zero, despite massive protests right at the end of quarter.

Q2 is the one to look at to measure actual sales impacts from the protests. The ramp for new Model Y has been fairly smooth, so it should be a full quarter of normal production if demand is there.

This quarter should be fairly representative. February Model Y sales were down significantly for the reason you espouse. March Y sales are up substantially due to unfulfilled orders for February and enhanced demand due to the new model.

However, Model Y availability is now "next day", meaning that the March bump is over.

New Model Y deliveries didn't really get to a good pace in the US until about mid-March.

Toward the end of the month, people said the new Y delivery was "same day" in the US. I looked and saw a few available, but only really specific color and wheel combinations. By the end of the quarter, those were gone and delivery times had jumped to ~2 weeks. All of this stuff varies a bit regionally, but it doesn't seem like they were sitting on meaningful inventory at the end.

I don't think extrapolating from this quarter to anything is particularly easy. It will get even more confusing in the second half, and next year, as they start self-delivering for "robotaxi" operations.

They might not have inventory (aka next day availability), but ~2 week availability means that they aren't production constrained and have already satisfied extraordinary demand for the new Model Y and are back to ordinary demand. When they were production constrained, delivery estimates were much longer than 2 weeks.

Tesla has the capacity to produce 2.5 to 3 million cars a year. They are constantly building new capacity.

The fact that they aren't production constrained isn't indicative of a decline is demand since the company only sold 1.7M cars last year.

The indication of a decline of demand is the decline in the number of sales we've seen over the last few quarters.

Model 3 sales are also down.

Well, January was indeed special, at least in Canada where four Tesla showrooms sold 8600 cars in just three days. https://fortune.com/2025/03/26/elon-musk-tesla-under-investi...

Tesla cars are sold online, not at dealerships or "showrooms" like other cars. A surge of buyers trying to cash in on $5k in rebates before it runs out isn't implausible.

There was already some antiTesla sentiment brewing, has been for quite a while but once he actually started his chainsaw schtick on the real government sentiment went down hill FAST.

Tesla has been vehemently opposed virtually since their founding. Only the hats of the opposition changed.

At $75, Snap was priced like Tesla. like the next dominant product, It's now about a tenth of that,

But what about the robots and robotaxis?

OK, sure, what about the glasses?

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