New Tesla Model Y Sales Bump Already Over In China?!

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Last Updated on: 25th April 2025, 04:10 am

Tesla’s big hope to get back to sales growth, or to at least stop the immense bleeding, was that the new Tesla Model Y would be a huge hit and make up for the drop in sales in the past year. Perhaps the idea of 50% growth a year is dead now (for Tesla, not for BYD), but could Tesla at least return to some form of sales growth on the back of the refreshed Model Y?

I figured it would take a couple of quarters to get a good sense of this when it comes to steady-state demand. I’d been hearing word that the refreshed Model Y was already running out of steam in China, though! Is that true?

Well, Larry Evans has gone and brought the receipts.

First of all, here’s a screenshot of the Tesla website in China showing a delivery wait time of just two to four weeks. In other words, Tesla has already worked through backlogs. This implies that even during the hottest time of vehicle demand, you don’t have to wait long at all to have your car produced and delivered to you. With that being the case already, what will the story be in 3 months?

This second image shows weekly Tesla insurance registrations in China, a proxy for vehicle sales. As you can see, after a notable rise, there’s a huge drop-off, and then just a gradual rise from that lower level. Yes, quarterly logistics come into play a bit here, but combine this with the 2–4 week wait times for delivery and things already don’t look super rosy in China.

Oh, yeah, and Larry adds, “And they are already offering 0% financing for 5 years on the new model, as well as other incentives. The new car bump didn’t last long.”

We already had a bad sign about any potential Tesla sales rebound looking at the Q1 report put out this week and seeing quite high inventory levels. These additional signs are just piling on.

There are potential ways all of this could be misleading. Perhaps inventory was high in Q1 because a lot of cars were still at the factory or in transit, not sitting at Tesla stores waiting to be bought. Perhaps wait times are not long for a new Model Y in China because China’s big allocation for deliveries is in the next 2–4 weeks, and then Model Y vehicles will be shipped elsewhere for a few weeks — and perhaps that potential inventory backlog is also shortening wait times. Perhaps there was the large drop-off in insurance registrations because the Chinese market has been starved of the new Model Y for the past few weeks, and they will spike far above Week 13’s level in the coming weeks when all of these new Tesla vehicles surge onto the market.

Maybe…. However, for now, taking all points together, it seems like expectations should be low. For the past year, there’s been much more overly optimistic forecasting of Tesla sales than reality delivered. And now Tesla is even warning about dropping demand in its quarterly report and conference call.