Tesla to Unveil New Roadster on Oct. 1, 2026, With SpaceX Cold Gas Thrusters

Tesla's third-quarter deliveries beat company-compiled analyst expectations by 5.3%, though they declined 2.1% from a year earlier, a drop partly cushioned by Q3 2025's tax credit boost. Seeking Alpha analyst Oliver Rodzianko said the biggest takeaway is that traditional EV demand remains resilient as Tesla pivots toward autonomous taxi services and humanoid robotics as its dominant operating models, while energy storage deployment numbers missed expectations. Rodzianko noted that Chinese rival BYD saw its battery-electric passenger-car sales rise 30.9% year-over-year in the third quarter, underscoring fierce competition in China. Analyst Alexander Grover argued the delivery number is a distraction, since Tesla's valuation assumes unsupervised self-driving at scale, and flagged that Alphabet's Waymo is running more than 500,000 paid driverless rides a week across 15 U.S. metros with LiDAR in its stack, while Tesla still does not disclose how many of its robotaxis run without a safety monitor.

President Donald Trump's aggressive trade policy has produced a mixed bag for American auto manufacturing, with analysts describing the gains as incremental rather than decisive. Since Trump returned to the White House, General Motors, Toyota, Ford and other carmakers have announced plans to expand US plants or shift production from overseas, navigating measures such as a 25-percent levy on imported autos. Toyota announced a $3.6 billion expansion of a San Antonio plant as it moves Tacoma pickup production from Mexico to San Antonio, while GM's $4 billion investments in Michigan, Kansas and Tennessee are not expected to lift US auto production until around 2030. Stephanie Brinley, an automotive analyst at Mobility Global, called the lift from Trump's tariffs a partial win, and industry experts view the unsettled nature of the trade measures as a hindrance to bigger wins, most recently in the dust-up between the United States and Canada that has clouded the prospects of the USMCA. Investment by auto suppliers plunged from more than $8 billion in the first quarter of 2025 to around $600 million in the two subsequent quarters before recovering somewhat, according to data from the Center for Automotive Research, whose industry economist Tyler Harp said suppliers are more exposed to tariffs and less able to absorb them than automakers. US auto employment stood at just under 1.8 million workers in September, almost one percent more than in January 2025 but more than two percent below the July 2024 peak, and Global Mobility projects US car production will be 10 million vehicles in 2026, rising to around 11.3 million in 2030.