Did TSLA's Jul 22 earnings miss actually break it from auto/EV peers?

Treated: TSLA. Donors: F, GM, RIVN (traditional + EV auto peers) — hand-picked, not algorithmic. Treatment date is the Jul 22 earnings report (auto gross margins 16.3% vs 18.4% expected, EPS $0.33 vs $0.55 consensus, FCF went negative on AI/robotics capex). Tests whether the post-earnings selloff is a real, company-specific fundamentals break from the auto sector, or whether TSLA was already diverging from these peers beforehand for unrelated reasons. Result: fails the fit-quality gate — see tsla_earnings_miss_growth_peers for the follow-up with a different donor pool.

Actual vs. synthetic counterfactual

68788898108 Treatment date Actual Synthetic
Actual Synthetic (counterfactual)

Fit quality

Fit-window RMSE9.3668
RMSE ÷ fit-window std dev1.78×
Fit-window days125
Confound-window mean gapn/a (fit-end = treatment date)
Post-period mean gap-28.80

Placebo test — same method run on every unit, treated one highlighted

UnitMean post-period gapMax abs. gap
TSLA (treated)-28.80%28.80%
F+5.70%5.70%
GM+5.63%5.63%
RIVN+2.43%2.43%

Verdict

Do not trust the gap below. The fit-window RMSE is 1.78× this unit's own fit-window standard deviation — the donor pool literally cannot reconstruct TSLA's pre-period path at all, which usually means the donor pool is the wrong choice for this unit (e.g. TSLA moved for reasons entirely disconnected from the donors' own drivers), not that a real effect was found. Pick a different/better-correlated donor pool before drawing any conclusion from this run.

Generated 2026-07-27 07:38 UTC · causal-toolkit · synthetic control (Abadie-Diamond-Hainmueller, outcome-only variant) · donor pool hand-picked, not algorithmically matched · treat every result here as directional, not a p-value.