Elon Musk has very ambitious goals for Tesla and during the opening of the company’s Berlin factory, reiterated previous statements that the company could be selling 20 million vehicles annually in 10 years. Curiously, he also said the best-case scenario would be for Tesla to build 10 million EVs a year.
This isn’t the first time Musk has touted the 20-million figure. In fact, he stated that Tesla will “probably” produce 20 million vehicles annually by 2030 back in September 2020, a target that many people consider impossible to achieve.
“I think it’s aggressive, but not impossible, that we could do 20 million cars in 10 years,” Musk said in Berlin. “And that would be a good number because there’s 2 billion cars and trucks in the world that are in active use, so 20 million would be then 1 percent of the global fleet per year.”
Before he said this, however, he was asked what would be the best-case scenario for Tesla production. “I suppose 10 [million]” he replied.
Tesla sold a touch under 1 million vehicles last year and if it were to sell 20 million cars in a single year, that would be roughly the same as what General Motors and the VW Group produced combined. It is a truly staggering number.
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There’s little doubt that Tesla’s sales and production numbers will grow in the coming years. The Berlin factory will have the capacity to produce 500,000 vehicles a year by 2025, Tesla’s Fremont site could be expanded to build 600,000 vehicles annually, the Austin factory could hit 400,000 vehicles by 2024, Tesla’s Chinese factory has a capacity of 864,000, and the carmaker is also looking to build a second factory in China.
Of course, actually hitting these capacity limits is not a given, particularly since the growing number of electric vehicles being launched by legacy automakers has already started to erode Tesla’s EV market share.
“Tesla is absolutely going to lose market share for EVs because they started with no competition,” vice president of global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions, Sam Fiorani said in a statement to Auto News. “It doesn’t matter if Tesla were to double or triple its size, the market is going to grow and there are going to be other players coming in.”
