For several years now, the American carmaker Tesla has held the title of the world's most valuable car manufacturer by market capitalization. Its current value (as of 29.9.2023) on the New York Stock Exchange is nearly 760 billion dollars. Tesla, however, has seen much better days in this regard. Tesla's stock was at an all-time high in November 2021, when it was traded for more than $400 per piece. The market capitalization was equivalent to approximately $1.27 trillion.*

Over the past year, Tesla's stock has lost about two-thirds of its value.* Much of this can be explained by the general sell-off in technology stocks. Other factors have also had an impact on value, notably the panic caused by Russia's military aggression against Ukraine, the energy crisis, high inflation and fears of a significant economic downturn in the world's key economies.

During this year, Tesla has undergone resurgence. Since January, its shares have gained nearly 124 percent, making Tesla one of the best-performing stocks on the main S&P 500 index.* The good mood among investors may be caused by the non-fulfillment of last year's catastrophic scenarios, general rise in popularity of electric cars, and expectations that Tesla will finally introduce new car models. It would be about time as Tesla has been promising to introduce new car models for quite some time.

Tesla's production volume has been growing steadily and solidly. To give you an idea, Tesla delivered just under 500,000 cars to the market in 2020. A year later, it was nearly 936,000, and last year it was already 1.3 million. Even the numbers for 2023 has been looking impressive so far. For the first two quarters of this year, Tesla has produced 889,000 vehicles, nearly the same volume as for all of 2021 and nearly 60 percent more than the same period last year.

If anything can hurt Tesla in the near term, it's losing the patience of its customers who are still waiting for new models to be introduced and delivered. For example, the extravagant Cybertruck pickup truck that Elon Musk unveiled in 2019, but which aren't due to be delivered until later this year.

A new generation of the Roadster, the first version of which has been on sale since 2017, is expected to enter the market within the next year. Elon Musk promises that the new Roadster would be able to accelerate from zero to 100 kilometers per hour within two seconds and drive up to 620 miles (nearly 1,000 kilometers) on a single battery charge.

Tesla is having trouble delivering on its promises even when it comes to trucks. The first semi-truck was introduced in 2017, but it was only late last year that Tesla delivered its first semi-truck, to Pepsi as part of a pilot production run. Since then, Tesla has so far failed to deliver any more "trucks" due to technical difficulties.

Furthermore, Tesla has long planned to deliver self-driving cars. The idea of a so-called robotaxi was first presented back in 2019. So far, it has remained just promises, although Tesla is still working on the development of an autonomous car.

A similar delay also applies on other planned models such as "people car", which should be priced under 25 thousand dollars (about CZK 580 thousand), or the Tesla van, or two other models that Elon Musk talked about this May. So far, investors don't seem to mind and believe that Musk's visions will be realized sooner or later. After all, the Tesla car company is literally running like clockwork so far in terms of production volume.

* Past data is not a guarantee of future returns.

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