Tesla has announced that it produced its four millionth vehicle since it first started producing cars in 2008. The milestone figure was announced by former Tesla China executive Tom Zhu during the Investor Day presentation at Giga Texas, who revealed the four millionth car was a Model Y built earlier today at Giga Texas.
The official Tesla Twitter account shared a video moments later of employees at Giga Texas celebrating the achievement.
We produced our 4 millionth vehicle at Giga Texas today ✌ pic.twitter.com/YMxb4zX5WB
— Tesla (@Tesla) March 1, 2023
It should come as no surprise that Tesla’s rate of production is accelerating with the introduction of two new factories over the past year.
According to figures shared by Zhu it took Tesla 12 years to build its first 1 million cars. The launch and production ramp of the Model 3 in 2018 significantly shortened the time it took to reach 2 million cars, just 18 months. It then took another 11 months to reach 3 million cars, a figure it achieved just last October.
Now seven months later it has been able to produce another 1 million cars and reach 4 million cars built in total.
These figures also give us another metric, Tesla’s current annual production rate. If Tesla took just seven months to build 1 million cars, that equates to about 142,000 cars per month or 1.7 million annually. This is in line with the installed capacity Tesla noted in their Q4 2022 shareholder deck.
Tesla obviously has no plans to maintain this production rate. The company is aiming to be able to produce 20 million cars per year by the end of the decade, a figure which would need approximately 12 Gigafactories around the world. Tesla currently has four vehicle Gigafactories in Fremont, Texas, Berlin, and Shanghai.
Given it takes several years from announcing a location to building it out and starting production, we should expect to see a number of new Gigafactories announced in the next few years. The next could be announced any day as it looks like Tesla has selected to build a new facility in Mexico.
