Tesla’s Turn Toward More Affordable Cars Hasn’t Fueled Sales

Tesla’s months of promoting more affordable vehicles have reportedly not yielded more sales.

As TechCrunch noted in a report Thursday (April 2), Elon Musk’s electric vehicle (EV) company last year debuted scaled-back versions of its Model Y and Model 3 starting at $39,990 and $36,990 respectively.

However, the company’s first-quarter sales figures show that Tesla delivered 358,023 EVs worldwide in the first three months of the year, below analysts’ expectations of about 368,000. Tesla also produced significantly more cars than it sold, at 408,386, the report added.

That means that Tesla only delivered approximately 6% more cars in the first quarter of this year than it did in the first quarter of 2025, its worst quarter in years. The Q1 2025 figures were also impacted by the company halting production for a few weeks for equipment overhauls, TechCrunch added, saying this suggests the new figures aren’t much of an improvement.

The report also points out that the figures are noteworthy for a carmaker that once pledged to expand EV sales 50% each year. The quarterly numbers also means Tesla is at risk of an overall downturn in sales for the third straight year, while its profits are also declining.

This trend is not confined solely to Tesla, TechCrunch wrote, as legacy automakers have scaled back or even cancelled plans for EVs.

Musk, meanwhile, has argued that robotics and autonomy represent the company’s next growth engines. Tesla said in January it would transform the California factory space used to make its Model S and Model X cars into a dedicated facility for its Optimus robots, targeting long-term capacity of 1 million units per year.

“It is time to bring the S and X programs to an end and shift to an autonomous future,” Musk said during an earnings call.

At the same time, the company acknowledged that Optimus is still in the research and development phase. Limited deployments within Tesla factories are used to test basic tasks, with older versions phased out as designs evolve.

“We wouldn’t expect to have any kind of significant Optimus production volume until probably the end of this year,” Musk said.

More recently, the multi-billionaire said Tesla could eventually build humanoid robots capable of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is generally defined as a form of AI capable of performing most intellectual tasks at human-level or greater.

In a post on his X social media platform, Musk said that Tesla will be one of the companies to develop AGI, and “probably the first to make it in humanoid/atom-shaping form.”