{"id":896,"date":"2026-10-21T02:13:37","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T02:13:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/?p=896"},"modified":"2026-10-21T02:13:37","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T02:13:37","slug":"tesla-reports-tonight-and-the-number-campers-should-watch-isnt-the-profit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/?p=896","title":{"rendered":"Tesla Reports Tonight &#8211; and the Number Campers Should Watch Isn&#8217;t the Profit"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/tesla-q3-2026-results-europe-autumn-camping-2026.avif\" alt=\"White Tesla Model Y with a rooftop tent at a misty lakeside campsite in Central Europe in late autumn\" \/><\/figure>\n<p>Tesla publishes its third-quarter numbers after the US market closes tonight &#8211; late evening in Europe, so most of us will read them with coffee tomorrow morning. There will be a great deal of noise about margins, capital spending and robotaxis.<\/p>\n<p>Very little of it will change what happens at a campsite. But there are one or two lines in tonight&#8217;s release that genuinely do, and they are worth knowing before you open it.<\/p>\n<p><em>A note on timing: this is written before the results are published. Everything below about the quarter itself is already known or is a consensus estimate, and I have said which is which.<\/em><\/p>\n<h2>What we already know about the quarter<\/h2>\n<p>Tesla published deliveries on 2 October:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>486,532 vehicles delivered<\/strong>, about 5.3% above the 461,974 analysts had expected, and up 1.3% on the second quarter<\/li>\n<li><strong>464,391 built<\/strong> &#8211; so it delivered 22,141 more cars than it produced, a second consecutive quarter of running down stock built up earlier in the year<\/li>\n<li><strong>Down 2.1% on a year ago.<\/strong> That comparison is brutal by construction: Q3 2025 was Tesla&#8217;s record quarter of 497,099, inflated by American buyers rushing to beat the expiry of the USD 7,500 federal tax credit on 30 September 2025<\/li>\n<li><strong>Model 3 and Model Y were 478,237 of the total<\/strong> &#8211; more than 98%. Everything else combined was 8,295, down 47.9% year on year<\/li>\n<li><strong>Energy storage: 13.7 GWh<\/strong>, up 9.6% year on year and 1.5% on the quarter, but below the roughly 15.9 GWh analysts had expected and short of the 14.2 GWh record set in Q4 2025<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>What is expected tonight, and why to treat it carefully<\/h2>\n<p>Consensus clusters around <strong>USD 27.8 to 28.1 billion of revenue<\/strong> against USD 28.1 billion a year ago, and adjusted earnings per share of <strong>USD 0.43 to 0.45<\/strong> against USD 0.50 &#8211; a fall of 10% to 14%. The spread of individual estimates is unusually wide, from about USD 0.30 to USD 0.70, which is a polite way of saying nobody is very sure.<\/p>\n<p>That uncertainty has a recent cause. In the second quarter Tesla delivered adjusted EPS of USD 0.33 against a consensus of roughly USD 0.50 &#8211; a miss of about 34%, the largest in around eight quarters. Automotive gross margin excluding regulatory credits fell from 19.2% to 16.3%. Revenue from selling regulatory credits to other manufacturers dropped 67% to USD 146 million, and that line used to be close to pure profit. Free cash flow was <em>minus<\/em> USD 1.09 billion with capital spending doubled to USD 5.8 billion, and management has guided to more than USD 25 billion of capital spending across 2026.<\/p>\n<p>So: Tesla is selling more cars and earning less per car. That is the story, and it has been the story for a while.<\/p>\n<h2>The bit that actually matters if you sleep in one<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Europe carried the quarter.<\/strong> The reason deliveries beat expectations was largely a European sales recovery plus steadier demand for Chinese-built cars overseas. The Model Y is currently the best-selling car of <em>any<\/em> type across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden at the same time, and in September it topped the German all-powertrain chart with 8,038 registrations, ahead of the VW Golf and the Tiguan. Giga Berlin has only just moved up to a rate of 7,500 cars a week to keep up.<\/p>\n<p>Why a camper should care about a sales chart:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Chargers follow cars.<\/strong> Campsites add charge points when enough guests turn up needing one. Every record quarter in a camping country is an argument for the site you want to stay at swapping a spare pitch for a socket.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The used market deepens.<\/strong> The cars being registered now are the three-year-old Model Ys that will be on forecourts in 2029 &#8211; with the flat-folding boot, the heat pump and Camp Mode intact.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The accessory ecosystem grows.<\/strong> More of one model on the road means more third-party kit that actually fits it, and cheaper.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And one line from the energy business rather than the car business: <strong>13.7 GWh of storage deployed in a single quarter<\/strong> is the same underlying idea as the box you put in your boot. Lithium iron phosphate cells, a battery management system, an inverter, an app. Tesla builds it at grid scale and you can buy it at camping scale.<\/p>\n<h2>The fourth quarter is the one to watch<\/h2>\n<p>To avoid a third consecutive year of declining deliveries, Tesla needs roughly <strong>311,000 cars in the final quarter<\/strong>. That is a lot, and companies that need a big fourth quarter tend to make it happen with money off. If you are thinking about buying, the honest advice is not to read tonight&#8217;s press release for a buying signal &#8211; it is to watch the configurator and the dealer inventory pages over the next six weeks.<\/p>\n<h2>What none of this changes<\/h2>\n<p>Whatever the share price does overnight &#8211; it closed at USD 354.72 on 16 October, down about a fifth since January &#8211; the car in your driveway does not get worse. The boot still folds flat, Camp Mode still holds the cabin at temperature through a frost without burning anything, and October is still one of the best months of the year to be at a near-empty pitch.<\/p>\n<p>If tonight&#8217;s numbers put you in the mood to book something, this is the kit that makes a cold European pitch comfortable:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/?p=637\">Tesla Roof Top Tent<\/a> &#8211; a bed off the wet ground, up in minutes, packed away damp without a fight<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/?p=638\">Tesla Inflatable Air Mattress<\/a> &#8211; or sleep inside the car and keep all 2,000 litres of boot for everything else<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/?p=612\">2048Wh LiFePO4 Portable Power Station<\/a> &#8211; 2048Wh for lights, pumps, laptops and phones, so a night at the pitch never eats the range you need to drive home<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/?p=613\">35L Dual-Zone Compressor Fridge<\/a> &#8211; dual zone, so drinks stay cold and the food survives day three<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/?p=610\">Tesla Trunk Organiser Box<\/a> &#8211; because a big boot turns into chaos by the second morning<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/?p=640\">Tablet Mount Holder<\/a> &#8211; navigation, charging stops and the weather warning you should have read an hour ago<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Read the results tomorrow if you like. Then go and use the car.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tesla publishes its third-quarter numbers after the US market closes tonight &#8211; late evening in Europe, so most of us will read them with coffee tomorrow morning. There will be a great deal of noise about margins, capital spending and robotaxis. Very little of it will change what happens at a campsite. But there are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":894,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.auto-tsl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}