News
Gassed Up: Prices at the pump fall, unlike Tesla’s delivery numbers
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This week, it came to my attention when driving by my local Sheetz gas station (if you’re ever in the vicinity of one, get the Chicken Tender sub) that gas prices are getting low. Low in the sense that it is much lower than the typical $2.79 that I see on the sign. When they’re sitting at $2.09, it makes me interested in why, especially considering my county and, more specifically, my entire state of Pennsylvania is on a “Stay at Home” order currently. Prices are low, but nobody is driving. When I travel to my Dad’s house or to go on a hike at a local trail, my commute time is typically anywhere from 2-5 minutes quicker as I am not forced to deal with an excess amount of cars on the road.
Most would think that these low gas prices would entice some to buy that vehicle they’ve always wanted—the gas-guzzling truck, maybe that petrol-pounding sports car. Who knows, people want different things. But you’d think low prices would lead to higher petrol-powered sales, and it isn’t. Teslas continue to sell, and they’re selling in record numbers.
But what’s interesting to me is the fact that nobody is driving, and nobody is buying cars. Yet, the overwhelming appeal of low gas prices, combined with the new oh-so-brilliant rollback on emissions that I wrote about last week, is making cars cheaper. With people out of work, there are still people out there getting paid, and some could be interested in buying cars. After all, Tesla owners are, because the company just had its best Q1 yet.
With showrooms of the world’s most popular automakers becoming more and more bloated, inventories rising above what a building can contain, and salespeople out of work, the LA Times says that manufacturers and showroom managers alike are ready to cut a deal. No cars moving out of the building is costing some companies hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. Service is where dealerships make their money, and that is, in reality, how some are managing to survive.
Unless, of course, there was a way that a carmaker could have customers order vehicles over the internet or phone. Then, that vehicle could be built to the buyer’s exact specifications and delivered or picked up without ever needed to come in contact with another human being. Oh, wait. This sounds familiar!
Tesla’s contactless delivery process has helped the company continue delivering vehicles to customers. While COVID-19 shut down some stores and provided barriers for delivery in others, Tesla found a way to work around that. The process was documented on our site a few weeks ago, and it showed that the company’s deliveries could continue without human-to-human contact.
According to the same LA Times article I talked about earlier, a Chevy dealership is “delivering” cars to people’s houses in a safe way. I’ll give credit where credit is due, and that’s a great way to adapt to the changing world we live in.
But as gas vehicles should appeal to people now more than ever because of low fuel prices, there’s plenty of evidence that suggests the tide is changing in favor of electric forms of transportation.
Let’s think about this:
1. Dealerships and petrol car manufacturers require government assistance to stay open. These businesses are laying off massive amounts of people, and they can’t afford to pay them currently at all. Their buildings are shut down, some dealerships are not running currently, and people are not buying gas vehicles anyway.
2. Tesla just released its Q1 2020 numbers. Despite Giga Shanghai being closed for an extended period, and Fremont being closed for the final week of the first quarter (which is where the company seems to push out massive amounts of vehicles to maximize delivery numbers), the company still had its biggest Q1 as a company. Eighty-eight thousand four hundred vehicles delivered in total, well above Wall Street’s estimates.
It is fair to assume a decent amount of these 88,400 cars were delivered before things got dicey here in the United States. Even still, Tesla has a lot to be proud of here.
I think all of us expected a slow Q1, and we all thought it was understandable. Even if things would have been even more impressive if deliveries and production were not affected by COVID, there is still a lot to be happy about. The whole situation is quite impressive, and it seems that Tesla’s ability to adapt to situations has led to its mass-appeal to car buyers.
Join me next week as I go ‘Beyond the News’ and give you my take on the current state of the industry and beyond.
Could it be that COVID is helping Tesla in a way? Not only is the big picture of environmental sustainability being answered through the lack of cars on the road, but the numbers suggest Tesla vehicles are being bought while gas cars are not. How is it that a car company could post its most impressive first quarter amidst a situation that has done nothing but hurt every other company in the world? The proof is in the pudding, and Tesla’s adaptability seems to be appealing to car buyers.
I use this newsletter to share my thoughts on what is going on in the Tesla world. If you want to talk to me directly, you can email me or reach me on Twitter. I don’t bite, be sure to reach out!
-Joey
Tesla Model Y configurations are getting hefty discounts and more benefits as the company is in the phase of its final sales push for the year.
Tesla is offering up to $1,500 off new Model Y Standard trims that are available in inventory in the United States. Additionally, Tesla is giving up to $2,000 off the Premium trims of the Model Y. There is also one free upgrade included, such as a paint color or interior color, at no additional charge.
NEWS: Tesla is now offering discounts of up to $1,500 off new Model Y Standard vehicles in U.S. inventory. Discounts of up to $2,000 are also being offered on Model Y Premiums.
These discounts are in addition to the one free upgrade you get (such as Diamond Black paint) on… pic.twitter.com/L0RMtjmtK0
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) December 10, 2025
Tesla is hoping to bolster a relatively strong performance through the first three quarters of the year, with over 1.2 million cars delivered through the first three quarters.
This is about four percent under what the company reported through the same time period last year, as it was about 75,000 vehicles ahead in 2024.
However, Q3 was the company’s best quarterly performance of all time, and it surged because of the loss of the $7,500 EV tax credit, which was eliminated in September. The imminent removal of the credit led to many buyers flocking to Tesla showrooms to take advantage of the discount, which led to a strong quarter for the company.
2024 was the first year in the 2020s when Tesla did not experience a year-over-year delivery growth, as it saw a 1 percent slide from 2023. The previous years saw huge growth, with the biggest coming from 2020 to 2021, when Tesla had an 87 percent delivery growth.
This year, it is expected to be a second consecutive slide, with a drop of potentially 8 percent, if it manages to deliver 1.65 million cars, which is where Grok projects the automaker to end up.
Tesla will likely return to its annual growth rate in the coming years, but the focus is becoming less about delivery figures and more about autonomy, a major contributor to the company’s valuation. As AI continues to become more refined, Tesla will apply these principles to its Full Self-Driving efforts, as well as the Optimus humanoid robot project.
Will Tesla thrive without the EV tax credit? Five reasons why they might
These discounts should help incentivize some buyers to pull the trigger on a vehicle before the year ends. It will also be interesting to see if the adjusted EV tax credit rules, which allowed deliveries to occur after the September 30 cutoff date, along with these discounts, will have a positive impact.
News
Tesla FSD’s newest model is coming, and it sounds like ‘the last big piece of the puzzle’
“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026.”
Tesla Full Self-Driving’s newest model is coming very soon, and from what it sounds like, it could be “the last big piece of the puzzle,” as CEO Elon Musk said in late November.
During the xAI Hackathon on Tuesday, Musk was available for a Q&A session, where he revealed some details about Robotaxi and Tesla’s plans for removing Robotaxi Safety Monitors, and some information on a future FSD model.
While he said Full Self-Driving’s unsupervised capability is “pretty much solved,” and confirmed it will remove Safety Monitors in the next three weeks, questions about the company’s ability to give this FSD version to current owners came to mind.
Musk said a new FSD model is coming in about a month or two that will be an order-of-magnitude larger and will include more reasoning and reinforcement learning.
He said:
“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026. We’re gonna add a lot of reasoning and RL (reinforcement learning). To get to serious scale, Tesla will probably need to build a giant chip fab. To have a few hundred gigawatts of AI chips per year, I don’t see that capability coming online fast enough, so we will probably have to build a fab.”
NEWS: Elon Musk says FSD Unsupervised is “pretty much solved at this point” and that @Tesla will be launching Robotaxis with no safety monitors in about 3 weeks in Austin, Texas. He also teased a new FSD model is coming in about 1-2 months.
“We’re just going through validation… https://t.co/Msne72cgMB pic.twitter.com/i3wfKX3Z0r
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) December 10, 2025
It rings back to late November when Musk said that v14.3 “is where the last big piece of the puzzle finally lands.”
With the advancements made through Full Self-Driving v14 and v14.2, there seems to be a greater confidence in solving self-driving completely. Musk has also personally said that driver monitoring has been more relaxed, and looking at your phone won’t prompt as many alerts in the latest v14.2.1.
This is another indication that Tesla is getting closer to allowing people to take their eyes off the road completely.
Along with the Robotaxi program’s success, there is evidence that Tesla could be close to solving FSD. However, it is not perfect. We’ve had our own complaints with FSD, and although we feel it is the best ADAS on the market, it is not, in its current form, able to perform everything needed on roads.
But it is close.
That’s why there is some legitimate belief that Tesla could be releasing a version capable of no supervision in the coming months.
All we can say is, we’ll see.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX IPO is coming, CEO Elon Musk confirms
However, it appears Musk is ready for SpaceX to go public, as Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger wrote an op-ed that indicated he thought SpaceX would go public soon. Musk replied, basically confirming it.
Elon Musk confirmed through a post on X that a SpaceX initial public offering (IPO) is on the way after hinting at it several times earlier this year.
It also comes one day after Bloomberg reported that SpaceX was aiming for a valuation of $1.5 trillion, adding that it wanted to raise $30 billion.
Musk has been transparent for most of the year that he wanted to try to figure out a way to get Tesla shareholders to invest in SpaceX, giving them access to the stock.
He has also recognized the issues of having a public stock, like litigation exposure, quarterly reporting pressures, and other inconveniences.
However, it appears Musk is ready for SpaceX to go public, as Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger wrote an op-ed that indicated he thought SpaceX would go public soon.
Musk replied, basically confirming it:
As usual, Eric is accurate
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2025
Berger believes the IPO would help support the need for $30 billion or more in capital needed to fund AI integration projects, such as space-based data centers and lunar satellite factories. Musk confirmed recently that SpaceX “will be doing” data centers in orbit.
AI appears to be a “key part” of SpaceX getting to Musk, Berger also wrote. When writing about whether or not Optimus is a viable project and product for the company, he says that none of that matters. Musk thinks it is, and that’s all that matters.
It seems like Musk has certainly mulled something this big for a very long time, and the idea of taking SpaceX public is not just likely; it is necessary for the company to get to Mars.
The details of when SpaceX will finally hit that public status are not known. Many of the reports that came out over the past few days indicate it would happen in 2026, so sooner rather than later.
But there are a lot of things on Musk’s plate early next year, especially with Cybercab production, the potential launch of Unsupervised Full Self-Driving, and the Roadster unveiling, all planned for Q1.
Tesla Model Y configurations get hefty discounts and more in final sales push
Tesla FSD’s newest model is coming, and it sounds like ‘the last big piece of the puzzle’
