Don’t say they didn’t warn you.

Four days on from a “highly unusual” decision to publish a compilation of sell-side analyst delivery forecasts (the IR page has a “consensus” column now), Tesla confirmed that Q4 deliveries were far below market expectations as they stood prior to this week.

When the company tipped a larger-than-expected YoY decline on December 29, the average of known delivery projections for 2025’s final quarter was around 440,000. Investors presumably recalibrated based on the above-mentioned, ad hoc press release. On Friday, Tesla said actual deliveries in Q4 were just 418,227, down 16% from the same period a year ago.

As the figure shows, that’s even larger than the declines witnessed in and around Elon Musk’s ill-advised foray into government “service,” if you can DOGE that.

Recall that Q3 deliveries (and sales) were bolstered by a kind of pull-forward effect ahead of tax credit expirations. Within that quarter’s ostensibly decent results, auto sales rose at just half the rate of overall revenue.

It’s thus no surprise that Q4’s numbers are lackluster. There was no real momentum in Q3. Indeed, Tesla hasn’t delivered (no pun intended) meaningful growth in nine quarters.

There’s the chart: 2025 marks the second consecutive year of declining deliveries.

And so it was that Musk lost the title of world’s largest EV maker to China’s BYD, which delivered 2.3 million EVs last year, far more than Tesla’s 1.64 million.

Musk successfully distracted investors this week with another allusion to an imminent robotaxi rollout. “Just testing the production system. Real production ramp starts in April,” he said, responding to a widely-followed netizen who posted pictures of the company’s Cybercab being produced.

Remember: At this point in its life Tesla’s best conceptualized as liquid Musk, unpalatable as that sounds. It’s not a car company. I mean, it is, but no one would pay up for shares of a “growth” stock with no growth.

You buy Tesla not because you’re bullish on the company’s cars, but rather because it’s the only publicly-traded slice of Musk’s empire. And because it’s a de facto holding company for his various and sundry experiments.

As I put it in October, As long as Tesla has enough liquidity to keep the labs staffed and open, there will be buyers for the stock. At what price I can’t say, but usually at a price that’s far higher than the fundamentals of the EV business can justify.