> "Tesla has sold fewer than a million cars since 2012."
At the end of 2019, Tesla's cumulative global sales were 891,000 units. They are targeting 500,000 for 2020 alone, so will be well over a million by now.
Tesla are very much in the process of scaling up, with massive factories under construction in Germany and Texas, and major expansion underway at the Shanghai factory. These factories will each be able to produce more than 500,000 vehicles per year.
Tesla only produced 350,000 vehicles in 2018. A million by the end of 2020 containing technology they don't have yet, in addition to vehicles sold to consumers, seems...ambitious.
The real targets are and always have been Toyota and VW. Tesla sold 440,808 vehicles on Q1 2023, so its annualized rate is currently 1,763,232. The company is on track to sell ~1.8 to 2.0 million vehicles this year -- already in the same league as BMW and Mercedes. Tesla unit sales have been growing by ~50%/year, on average. If unit growth stays at this level (a big IF!), Tesla will overtake Ford in 2-3 years, GM in 3-4 years and Toyota and VW in 4-5 years.
World's largest carmakers by number of vehicles sold in 2022:
Automaker # sold 2022
----------------------------
1 Toyota 9,566,961
2 VW 8,263,104
3 Hyundai Kia 6,848,198
4 Stellantis 6,002,900
5 GM 5,941,737
6 Ford 4,235,737
7 Honda 4,074,372
8 Nissan 3,225,478
9 BMW 2,399,636
10 Changan 2,347,163
11 Renault 2,051,174
12 Mercedes 2,043,900
13 Maruti Suzuki 1,940,067
14 Geely 1,432,988
15 Tesla 1,369,611
Tesla has sold about 1.4M cars in just last two years. 500k last year and 910k (likely more) this year.
Next year Tesla is going to sell probably at least 1.5M cars. Given they have two new factories, and Tesla Shanghai factory is expanding again, 2M wouldn't surprise me.
Does anybody sell more than 2 million >$70,000 vehicles a year? Tesla wants to sell 2 million cars this year and 3 million next year. The total market size for premium vehicles is only so big.
Tesla is claiming they'll be able to produce 500,000 cars a year by the end of 2017 when the cars are finally available.
This is a very agressive goal, and I'm not sure they can meet it, but I'm fairly certain their production capacity will be higher than it is today, especially given the unused capacity in the gigafactory that will come online over the next 1.5 years.
The rate at which they are increasing sales is pretty incredible[1]. Elon's predictions are very often bullshit. But I wouldn't underestimate Tesla's growth.
Tesla produced 53,339 vehicles in the most recent quarter. That works out to ~4,444 vehicles per week. Also, the vehicles per week figure is increasing.
To be fair, they would only produce ~231k/year at this run rate, which would be disappointing for a factory that is capable of ~430k/year. Hopefully their production rate will improve considerably by the end of the year.
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