Investor's Corner
Tesla Model 3 becomes August’s 5th best-selling passenger car, 15th in US’ overall auto sales
Tesla took longer than expected to ramp the production of the Model 3, but now the company is finally hitting its manufacturing stride, and the electric sedan is starting to make waves in the US auto industry — some very serious waves.
Auto sales tracking website GoodCarBadCar has posted the estimated sales figures of car manufacturers currently operating in the United States in August. Based on their August 2018 data, the Tesla Model 3 has become America’s 5th best-selling passenger car. The electric car’s rankings for August is up two places from its rank in July, when the Model 3 was listed as the 7th best-selling passenger car in the US.
The auto sales tracking website now lists the Model 3 directly behind the big four of the US passenger car segment — the Toyota Camry, the Honda Civic, the Honda Accord, and the Toyota Corolla Family — all of which are lower-priced than the electric car. The Model 3’s strong August sales figures allowed it to overtake two more affordable vehicles in GCBC‘s rankings as well, the Hyundai Elantra and the Nissan Altima.
The Tesla Model 3 is not just establishing itself as a formidable competitor in the US’ passenger car market, either. The Model 3 also made it to the Top 20 of GoodCarBadCar‘s overall rankings for US auto sales, which include SUVs and trucks such as the best-selling Ford F-150, the Dodge RAM, the Toyota Rav4, and the Honda CR-V. So far, the Model 3 is 15th on the overall list for August, beating out popular SUVs such as the Jeep Wrangler, Jeep Grand Cherokee, and the Subaru Outback.
The Model 3’s estimated August sales are quite impressive, considering that Tesla is still in the process of ramping the production of the electric car. Tesla, after all, plans to eventually build 10,000 Model 3 per week, and so far, the company is only producing around half of that number weekly.
Tesla ended Q2 2018 on a strong note, producing 5,000 Model 3 vehicles in a seven-day period. Despite this milestone, the company’s critics are highly skeptical that Tesla would be able to maintain its optimum production numbers. That said, over the first two months of Q3, Tesla appears to have taken it upon itself to prove its critics wrong.
During the Q2 2018 earnings call, Elon Musk mentioned that Tesla was able to maintain a production rate of 5,000 Model 3 per week during “multiple weeks” in July. In August, the company also showed encouraging signs about the electric car’s production. Tesla’s VIN registrations for the Model 3, for one, rocketed past the 100,000-vehicle mark, and Bloomberg‘s online Model 3 production tracker even showed a week where the company seemed to have produced more than 6,000 units of the electric sedan in a seven-day period.
Perhaps the most notable vote of confidence for the company’s Model 3 production ramp came from veteran auto analyst George Galliers from Evercore ISI, who was given an extensive tour of the Fremont factory, including the newly built GA4 set up on the grounds of the facility. The analyst later published a report about his visit, noting that Tesla is well on its way to sustaining a weekly production rate of 5,000-6,000 Model 3 per week.
“Tesla seems well on the way to achieving a steady weekly production rate of 5,000 to 6,000 units per week. We are incrementally positive on Tesla following our visit. We have confidence in their production. We did not see anything to suggest that Model 3 cannot reach 6k units per week and 7k to 8k with very little incremental capital expenditure. Focusing on the fundamentals and setting aside talk of privatization, we are incrementally positive on Tesla following our visit,” Galliers noted.
Investor's Corner
Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) beat Wall Street expectations of 406,000 vehicles delivered in Q2 by reporting 480,126 deliveries for the three months ending in June.
Tesla reported it delivered 467,762 Model 3 and Model Y units, while 12,364 Model S, Model X, and Cybertrucks switched hands during the quarter. The Model S and Model X were officially sunset this past quarter and will no longer be part of the company’s Production & Delivery reports moving forward.
🚨 BREAKING: Tesla delivered 480,126 vehicles in Q2, ANNIHILATING Wall Street expectations of 406,000. Production was reported at 451,758.
Deliveries:
Model 3/Y: 467,762
Other Models: 12,364Production:
Model 3/Y: 442,936
Other Models: 8,822 https://t.co/TTHwQAsKt8 pic.twitter.com/7qI4Zj6FE5— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 2, 2026
The quarter is a pleasant surprise and a good rebound from Q1, when Tesla slightly missed the Wall Street consensus of 365,645 cars by reporting 358,023 deliveries for the first three motnhs of the year.
Energy storage deployments also provided some strength in Tesla’s delivery report, hitting 13.5 GWh for Q2. This is a particular division of Tesla’s business that has been overwhelmingly robust over the past few years, truly being a strong point of the company’s overall model.
For the year, Tesla analysts still predict deliveries to trend in the 1.69 million unit region, a modest 3 to 5 percent increase from the 1.64 million cars the company delivered last year. Tesla will likely return to more sequential and noticeable year-over-year growth as the Cybercab project starts to ramp up considerably in the next few years.
Tesla has some other potential catalysts to spur vehicle deliveries, too. Not only is it expecting Cybercab to truly start making a change in the next few years, but other vehicles could be entering the company’s lineup.
Tesla sends production Cybercab with no steering wheel, pedals to on-road testing
The slightly longer Model Y L has been a highly speculated release candidate in the U.S. It has already done incredibly well in China, and U.S. buyers have been wanting slightly more interior space than the Model Y. Now that the Model X is gone, it is more needed than ever.
Q2 highlights a pretty stable automotive division within Tesla, and no true concerns arise from these figures, especially considering it managed to beat expectations convincingly.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
Tesla brings Model Y L ‘Launch Series’ to the U.S. at $61,990
Tesla just told us twice that Model Y L is coming to the U.S.
