Tesla wants to build 2,000,000 cars a year... by the end of this year

Big public stockholder meetings are as much hype trains as they are anything else. The stock market being the way it is – i.e. largely based on hype and who buys into said hype – rather dictates that.

So to hear Elon Musk say that Tesla’s “aiming to achieve a two-million vehicle run rate for the year by the end of this year” is perhaps not the most bombastic thing in context.

And especially not when, as Musk put it, “we’ve already been able to achieve 1.5 million annualised run rate", and especially not when, “in the last few weeks, we made our three millionth car".

But what is ‘run rate’, exactly? Well, it’s an estimate, really. You take stock of how you’re doing within a smaller time frame and extrapolate that to a larger one. So, by June, Tesla was on track to build 1.5 million cars this year. As of 5 August, a bit of number crunching suggests a full two million Teslas built in the space of a year.

So big hype, yes. And big enough numbers, predicated on what’s tantamount to an estimate, to... let’s say encourage healthy scepticism. But also big enough results to suggest it’s possible.

Looking back over the past decade of Tesla, Musk reflected on just how much of a juggernaut the company had become.

“It’s pretty wild to think about 10 years ago, where things were,” he said.

“Ten years ago, we’d made less than 3,000 cars... and here we stand, 10 years later, having made more than 3,000,000.”

The start of the 2020s also marked Tesla’s move from a company sustained on investment and borrowing to one that actually turned a profit. That, as you might expect, is largely down to the literal sell-out success (have a look at Tesla’s wait times for proof) for the Model 3 and Model Y.

Musk estimates that the Model Y – that’s the crossover-type one – is set to be the highest-selling vehicle by revenue this year (as in number sold multiplied by unit price), and the highest-selling vehicle by unit volume in 2023.

So, apart from building millions of cars a year, making the most revenue from its cars and building the world’s best-selling car, all by some time next year... what else does the future (or future hype trains) hold?

Well, later on in the presentation, Musk mused about how many cars Tesla will have made by August 2032 – 10 years from now. “I’d say 100 million is pretty doable.”  

So, are you all aboard the hype train?