Tesla hits new quarterly record, delivers 241,300 vehicles in Q3

Tesla delivered 241,300 vehicles globally in its third-quarter. Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi and Julie Hyman weigh in.

Video Transcript

- The only positive I've seen-- positive I've seen in the market the past week is Tesla. And those delivery numbers over the weekend were good. But I think more evidence that that is a Tesla specific story of a company that is operating very well, very efficiently, and is also an upstart automaker, and doesn't have the same concerns as the legacy automakers do right now, GM, Ford with the chip supply shortage.

- Yeah, so that number that you see on your screen there, 241,300, was the vehicles, the deliveries during the third quarter. The prediction was about 228,000, 220,900 to be specific here. So above what analysts had been estimating. You know what's really interesting to me, and listen, I have admittedly been a Tesla skeptic at times here, Soz, but what's so fascinating to me is who would have thunk that Tesla was operating well because of execution, right?

I think even some of the Tesla bears out there didn't necessarily question the demand for Teslas, they questioned Tesla's ability to get cars out the door. Of course, we all remember Elon Musk sleeping under his desk or wherever at the Tesla factory. The company operating out of tents. Some of the challenges it had during COVID with getting people to work safely and getting the cars out the door. Now, you have the chip shortage.

And here's Tesla that's performing well through that. And Tesla that is getting cars out of the door in a way that other automakers aren't able to. I think this is a bit of a surprising development. And obviously, a welcome one for the Tesla bulls.

- Yeah, look, they have been moving very quickly to rewrite software, so they don't have the same problems with chips. Not to say that it's smooth sailing on the chip front for Tesla, but again, I think there's bigger problems over to GM and Ford right now.

And overall, I would say this, just going back to my bearishness that we were talking about in the brief, Julie, if Tesla came out about six months ago and hammered the whisper numbers on the street with its deliveries, I would argue we'd see Tesla shares up 10% pre-market. We only see it up about not even 3% here, which I think underscores the nervousness in this market ahead of a Tesla earnings, ahead of automaker earnings, ahead of any earnings report in a couple of weeks.

- And speaking of some other car news that is coming down the pike, a couple of things that we're going to talk about later in the show, Volvo, it looks like it is going to be filing for an IPO in Stockholm specifically. And Rivian looks like it is going to be going public as well in an IPO here in the US. So again, we'll be talking about those two automakers later in the show. We'll be talking about GM as well. Lots more auto news to come.