It Sure Looks Like Elon Musk Ruined Tesla’s Q1 2025 Sales

No matter how you cut it, Tesla began 2025 with an awful first quarter. The electric automaker announced Wednesday morning that it delivered 336,681 vehicles in Q1 and produced 362,615. That’s significantly lower than the 390,000 deliveries that Bloomberg expected based on early analyst estimates. Year-over-year deliveries were also down from 386,810 in Q1 2024, which works out to about a 13% drop in sales. 

Tesla’s quarter-over-quarter sales performance was even worse than its already bad year-over-year sales, too. It delivered 495,570 vehicles in Q4 2024, which means its 336,681 Q1 sales were a little more than 32% lower than in the previous quarter. 

Q1 sales tend to be lower than the previous Q4, but still: Automakers generally prefer for their year-over-year sales to go up instead of down. Q1 2025 was also Tesla’s worst quarter for deliveries since Q2 2022, with European sales down nearly 43 percent and Bloomberg reporting Chinese sales slipped by double digits, as well. 

Some of this was to be expected, since, as previously mentioned, Q1 sales are usually lower than Q4, and Tesla also recently switched its factories over to begin building the updated Model Y. That’s just one of the five vehicles Tesla makes, but its Model S, Model X, and Cybertruck sales may as well be a rounding error in the company’s overall sales. Those three combined only accounted for 12,881 deliveries or less than 4% of total deliveries in Q1 2025. So, losing a few weeks of Model Y is a bigger deal for Tesla than you might think it would be. Additionally, the new Tesla Roadster once again accounted for 0% of Tesla’s sales.

While taking time to slap a Cybertruck-inspired front end on the Model Y certainly didn’t help things, there’s no way to talk about Tesla’s Q1 performance without mentioning Elon Musk, the man who is still, at least ostensibly, the company’s CEO. Reportedly angry the federal government’s regulation kept getting in his way, Musk dove headfirst into the world of far-right politics, spending some $300 million to help get Donald Trump reelected. 

Since then, in addition to championing the DOGE division that has controversially slashed numerous U.S. government agencies, he’s attempted to use his wealth to sway both the Wisconsin Supreme Court election this week, and German elections earlier in 2025.

At this point, for many, it has become impossible to separate Tesla from Musk and his politics, and as Trump’s approval rating drops, it sure looks like Elon Musk’s political involvement is hurting Tesla sales. It certainly isn’t the only reason sales dropped in Q1, but with anti-Tesla protests growing across the country, it’s hard to envisage new sales recovering anytime soon, while the value of used examples like the Tesla Cybertruck continue to plummet.