Liam Denning, Columnist

Tesla’s Numbers Come With Some Reservations

Troubling trends lie beneath the headline of record vehicle deliveries.

January 2, 2019 at 4:59 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

What’s under the hood?
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Only in Tesla-land could a chart like this provoke a 10 percent slump in the stock at the open:

Tesla Inc. kicked off 2019 with a sales report boasting it had delivered almost as many vehicles in 2018 — 245,240 — than in all prior years combined. Roughly 91,000 found a home in the fourth quarter, triple what was sold in the first quarter. Even so, Tesla fell short of expectations (shares were down about 6 percent as of writing this).