Tesla revealed today that it manufactured 509,737 cars this year, meeting its goal of producing half a million cars in 2020. The automaker made a total of 499,550 deliveries (99.91 percent) throughout the year, and there"s a chance that this number could be higher, as Tesla mentioned the possibility of the number varying by up to 0.5 percent or more due to its "slightly conservative" method of counting deliveries. A car is only counted as delivered after it has been delivered to the owner and all paperwork is correct.
A Twitter user uploaded a snippet of an interview that Elon Musk, Tesla"s CEO, gave in 2014 in which he was asked how the Nevada Gigafactory will help the automaker ramp up production.
"I feel confident that we will be able to achieve at least half a million cars a year by 2020" — @elonmusk in 2014pic.twitter.com/n0FCO8dg4b
— Pranay Pathole (@PPathole) January 2, 2021
Tesla"s Shanghai plant has begun production of Model Y cars and its deliveries are expected to begin shortly.
2020 was an eventful year for Tesla. The automaker manufactured its 1,000,000th electric car in March, and its factories in California and Shanghai had to be closed for several weeks to curb the spread of COVID-19. Musk threatened to pull the factory out of California and defied lockdown orders. Tesla also overtook Toyota to become the world"s most valuable automaker in 2020.