Tesla says battery supply, not demand, is what’s holding back its car sales. In its Q3 2026 shareholder letter, the automaker wrote that “battery availability continued to be the limiting factor in increasing auto volumes in the quarter.”

It also claims it ended Q3 with “the largest backlog for our passenger vehicles in four years.” But the numbers in the same letter don’t line up with a company that has more buyers than cars.

Tesla reports its third-quarter 2026 financial results tomorrow, October 21, after the market closes. The earnings call follows at 5:30 p.m. ET.

Wall Street expects revenue to come in flat and earnings per share to drop 10% from a year ago, even though Tesla just beat its own delivery consensus by more than 24,000 vehicles.

Tesla delivered just 8,295 “Other Models” in Q3 2026, down 48% from a year ago and the lowest total for the category since 2021. With the Model S and Model X out of production, almost all of them were Cybertrucks.

That gives us the cleanest look yet at Cybertruck sales. We estimate Tesla delivered 7,000 to 8,000 of the trucks last quarter, a pace of about 30,000 a year from a line it planned for 250,000.

Tesla (TSLA) delivered 486,532 vehicles in the third quarter of 2026, down 2.1% from the record 497,099 it delivered in the same quarter last year.

That’s still about 25,000 more than Wall Street expected, with the consensus at 461,974 deliveries. Tesla also delivered about 22,000 more vehicles than it built.

Wall Street can’t agree on how many cars Tesla (TSLA) sold in Q3 2026. Estimates from major banks range from 421,758 to 482,000 deliveries ahead of Friday’s report.

That’s a 60,000-unit spread. And after the Street missed Tesla’s Q2 deliveries by 74,000 units, nobody has much credibility on this one.