Tesla achieves annual run rate of 1 million electric cars – incredible milestone

Tesla has confirmed that it has achieved an annual run rate of 1 million electric cars per year at the end of last quarter.

After Tesla reported production of 237,823 vehicles and the delivery of 241,300 vehicles last quarter, we declared that Tesla has basically achieved a run rate of 1 million vehicles.

Now the automaker confirmed that it exited the last quarter with a run rate of 1 million cars – an incredible achievement for a company that was only delivering a few thousand cars per year less than a decade ago.

During Tesla’s Q3 earnings call, Tesla CFO Zach Kirkhorn confirmed the news:

“We were also able to achieve an annualized production run rate of over 1 million cars towards the end of the quarter. The increase in production rate has been primarily been driven by further ramping of Model Y at Gigafactory Shanghai. Additionally, we have made great progress in increasing production volume of Model S and have recently started production and ramp of Model X.”

It means that Tesla achieved a weekly global production rate of 19,000 to 20,000 vehicles toward the end of the quarter.

CEO Elon Musk had recently confirmed that Gigafactory Shanghai has now surpassed Fremont factory in production rate.

It’s not really represented in Tesla’s newly released installed production capacity chart:

But while the capacity is “installed”, the actual production rates vary based on supply chain and efficiency at different locations and at different times.

Tesla achieved the milestone in Q3 despite some significant supply chain challenges that have been plaguing the auto industry for the better part of the last year.

The newly Texas-based automaker is one of the rare carmakers that is still growing despite those supply chain challenges.

Electrek’s Take

This is truly an incredible achievement by Tesla and a good look for Q4 if the supply chain issues don’t become worse.

And to be clear, I am mainly talking about the production ramp being impressive here.

I always knew that Tesla could sell however how many cars that they can produce, but to go from an annual production rate 20,000 cars in 2013 to 1 million cars in 2021 is absolutely wild and should be celebrated.

Congrats to everyone involved.

Subscribe to Electrek on YouTube for exclusive videos and subscribe to the podcast.