NEW YORK, Jan 7, 2026, 15:47 EST — Regular session
Tesla, Inc. shares were little changed on Wednesday, up 0.4% at $434.75 in afternoon trading, as investors weighed fresh signs of weakness in Europe against a renewed burst of interest in autonomous-driving tech. The stock has traded between $431.66 and $438.35 so far in the session.
Germany’s road traffic agency KBA said Tesla sold 2,032 cars in December, down 48% from a year earlier, while its 2025 registrations in the country fell 48.4% to 19,390 units. The data underscored how quickly the U.S. automaker is losing ground in Europe even as overall electric-vehicle registrations in Germany rose 43.2% in 2025, and BYD’s December sales jumped more than 12-fold to 4,109 vehicles. 1
The timing matters because Tesla heads into its next earnings report with investors looking for a clearer read on demand, pricing and margins after a softer year for deliveries. Tesla said it delivered 418,227 vehicles in the fourth quarter and 1,636,129 in 2025, and it scheduled its fourth-quarter results and webcast for Jan. 28 after market close. 2
The stock’s recent swings have also tracked the market’s obsession with self-driving and robotics — a big part of the premium some investors put on Tesla beyond its car business. Nvidia on Jan. 5 rolled out “Alpamayo,” a set of open-source autonomous-driving models and tools, with CEO Jensen Huang calling it “the ChatGPT moment for physical AI,” while Tesla shares fell 4.14% on Tuesday. 3
Tesla CEO Elon Musk tried to play down the competitive threat, writing on social media: “I’m not losing any sleep about this,” MarketWatch reported. He said any real pressure would take years to show up as carmakers redesign vehicles around cameras and computing hardware. 4
Competition is also building around humanoid robots, another area Musk has pitched as a long-term growth driver. Mobileye said it would buy humanoid robotics startup Mentee Robotics for about $900 million, a deal it announced at CES in Las Vegas, as it tries to apply autonomous-driving software and sensing know-how to “embodied AI” — the use of AI in physical machines. 5
On the corporate side, a Tesla filing showed director James Murdoch sold 60,000 shares on Jan. 2 in a Rule 10b5-1 plan — a pre-arranged trading program that sets stock sales in advance. The sales were made at weighted-average prices roughly in the $436 to $458 range, and the filing listed remaining holdings through trusts. 6
But the setup cuts both ways. A rough Europe print, any hit to pricing, or another delay in autonomy milestones could land harder when the stock is trading on big expectations about future software and robotics profits, not just vehicle volume.
Next up is Tesla’s fourth-quarter results on Jan. 28, where investors will focus on margins, 2026 outlook and any updated timeline for autonomy and robotaxis.
