Is the battery car business deflating?

I look at Tesla's business

How big is Tesla? Are car sales down and Tesla is doomed?

Note: I own a few shares of Tesla. I own about 20 other stocks, too.

I have been in discussions on a blog where the proprietor regularly refers to the battery car business as a deflating bubble when a manufacturer announces a change in plans to produce fewer models or some other news which indicates a reduced commitment to battery cars.

I don’t own a battery car and have only ridden in a Tesla car once, about 10 years ago, when a group went to lunch and back to the office. Maybe 30 minutes total of driving time.

The trend I see is that electricity is becoming more available all over the world. With today’s solar panels I can get approximately twice as much electricity from my roof than was the case in 2000. Sources of electricity are popping up everywhere. Numbers of battery cars first can be seen on this graph in 2013 and have grown each year since.

Today’s battery cars are good, and improving all the time. For many already they are more convenient due to home charging, economical since the kWh to charge is often less expensive per mile than gasoline, and owners report they are just plain fun! In 2026, the Chinese will require all car batteries to meet their new “No Fire, No Explosion” standard. Some manufacturers now have products on the market that have passed the testing.

I am convinced that slowly it will become common for many drivers to use battery cars, perhaps 80% fifteen years from now according to an estimate I saw by Vitol dot com. They are oil traders and predicting the market is their business.

Worldwide, the trend is that production numbers of internal combustion engine cars has peaked in around 2018 and was down about 20% in 2024.

So I took a look at Tesla. Are car sales down? What fraction of the business is solar panels and non-automotive batteries?

My answer is that Tesla’s car sales were down very slightly from 2023, but they made a lot of cars. Tesla’s solar and battery division set a record for total nameplate generating capacity.

Both divisions are multi-billion dollar businesses. The robot business has not started to record revenue.

Car deliveries worldwide trended up in every quarter of 2024, but the first quarter is the slowest for car sales in general. The total car sales in 2024 was down 1.1% from 2023. The number sold in 2024 was about 1.8 million cars. Sales were down 11.6% from 2023 in the US. Sales in China in 2024 were up 8.8%. Sales were down in Europe 14% compared to 2023.

The Automotive Division had $78.5 billion in revenue in 2024.

The Energy and Energy Storage Division, the only other division, had revenue of $8.6 billion in 2024. The nameplate GW of the solar panels and solar roofs was 31.4 GW, or 31,400 MW.

(A typical central power plant size is on the order of 1,000 MW, but they vary in size from under 100 MW for to several thousand MW. My own rule of thumb is 1 or 2 MW per 10,000 population, including electricity used by the factories, offices, hospitals, stores, and all other buildings in town.)

My conclusion is that it would be a large effort to cause Tesla to endure a bubble and for car sales to disappear. I don’t see a deflating bubble in the battery car business.