{"id":204121,"date":"2025-12-21T21:36:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-21T21:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/204121\/"},"modified":"2025-12-21T21:36:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-21T21:36:10","slug":"is-anyone-still-counting-car-sales-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/204121\/","title":{"rendered":"is anyone still counting car sales? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Who cares about falling sales, missed targets and a business model even valuation experts struggle to define?<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Not <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/tesla\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/tesla\">Tesla<\/a> shareholders, with shares hitting their first all-time high of 2025, driving its market capitalisation above $1.6 trillion.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">It came just a few weeks after the latest round of weak car sales \u2013 EU sales slumped 48 per cent in October \u2013 and less than a week after long-term Tesla bull Morgan Stanley downgraded the stock due to its \u201cfull valuation\u201d.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">That\u2019s one way of putting it. Tesla trades on about 210 times estimated earnings.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">EV sales, hurt by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/elon-musk\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/elon-musk\">Elon Musk<\/a>\u2019s polarising political rhetoric, won\u2019t revive any time soon. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Deepwater\u2019s Gene Munster predicts Tesla will probably miss delivery expectations in 2026, with actual growth far below estimates. However, that \u201cdoesn\u2019t change the Tesla investment case, which is built on FSD [full self-driving], Robotaxi and Optimus\u201d.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">That is, car sales barely register \u2013 what matters is Musk\u2019s vision of robotics and a driverless future. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Hence, the buoyant reaction to Tesla testing driverless taxis in Austin without safety operators. Wedbush\u2019s perennially bullish Dan Ives says 2026 will be a \u201cmonster\u201d year for Tesla, with a potential $3 trillion market capitalisation if autonomy and robotics succeed, despite these being unproven revenue streams.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Another analyst, William Blair\u2019s Jed Dorsheimer, estimates the motor business accounts for just $30-$40 of Tesla\u2019s $475 share price. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The uncertainty is reflected in Morgan Stanley\u2019s wildly varying bull case for Tesla shares ($860) and bear case ($145).<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Little wonder valuation expert and former Tesla shareholder Prof Aswath Damodaran is flummoxed. \u201cI\u2019m not even sure what Tesla is as a company any more,\u201d he said recently. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">\u201cI can\u2019t tell you what the story is because I\u2019m not sure Tesla knows what the story is going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">In short, Tesla\u2019s price is a bet on a future that may not exist, and a reminder that even the experts can\u2019t agree on what they\u2019re buying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Who cares about falling sales, missed targets and a business model even valuation experts struggle to define? Not&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,605,61,60,2395,1188],"class_list":["post-204121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-elon-musk","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-morgan-stanley","tag-tesla"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}