Tesla sold a record 97,000 vehicles last quarter. Now Wall Street wants to know if it’s making enough per vehicle to stem losses and create sustained profits. Wall Street analysts doubt it. Those polled by FactSet don’t expect Tesla to make even a small profit until the final three months of 2020. In a note to investors, Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives wrote that third-quarter earnings are a “fork in the road” moment, with Tesla either showing a path toward profits or staying on “this treadmill of kicking the earnings can further down the
road.” CEO Elon Musk last year pledged to be profitable in the future, and the company made money in the third and fourth quarters. But production delays for the Model 3 small car and high costs drove it to lose more than $1 billion in the first half of this year. Analysts expect Tesla to report an $83 million third-quarter net loss late this month or early in November. A big question is whether Tesla can generate profits on the Model 3, its least-expensive model starting around $39,000. In the third quarter, the Model 3 made up nearly 80,000 of Tesla’s sales