Tesla sets vehicle delivery record but falls just short of Musk’s target
Tesla set a fresh record for vehicle delivery numbers in 2020, but narrowly missed out on hitting boss Elon Musk’s target.
The electric car maker delivered 499,950 vehicles during the year, well above Wall Street expectations of 481,261 vehicles.
However, the figure was 450 vehicles shy of Musk’s target of half a million.
In a tweet yesterday Musk wrote: “So proud of the Tesla team for achieving this major milestone!
“At the start of Tesla, I thought we had (optimistically) a 10% chance of surviving at all.”
The numbers will come as a further boost to Tesla, which has defied a coronavirus-induced downturn in the wider automotive industry to achieve a year of bumper growth.
Tesla’s share price soared 700 per cent last year and the company was admitted to the S&P 500 index in December.
Its market capitalisation has now reached almost $670bn, making it the sixth most valuable publicly-listed US company.
But the meteoric growth has raised eyebrows, with some investors viewing Tesla as wildly overvalued.
At the beginning of the year the manufacturer said it would “comfortably exceed 500,000 units” — a target it left unchanged despite the pandemic.
The California-based company has benefited from the opening of a new factory in Shanghai, which has begun production of its Model Y cars.
Vehicle deliveries hit 180,570 in the final three months of 2020, marking a new quarterly record for the firm.