Tesla's total production reaches 5 million cars

Tesla has passed another significant milestone in its journey as an automaker, now having built over 5 million cars at its Gigafactories around the world. What’s makes this milestone so impressive is how quickly Tesla has been able to ramp production since building its first car in 2008.

The milestone figure was reached sometime this week and announced by Tesla on X on Saturday afternoon. However unlike previous milestone announcements no details were provided, like where this car was built, which model it was, and there was no picture of the factory workers that helped build it celebrating the moment. Instead this time Tesla thanked the owners that helped them reach this point for their support.

This week, we produced our 5 millionth car—thank you Tesla owners for your ongoing support!

— Tesla (@Tesla) September 16, 2023

UPDATE 9:43pm PT: Tesla has announced on Weibo that the five millionth car was a new Model 3 Highland built at Giga Shanghai, and included the picture we all expected to see.

Credit: Tesla

As we know Tesla started out as a very small car manufacturer, first producing a high priced sports car, the Roadster, in 2008. From there the company expanded the lineup to include a high priced sedan, the Model S, and then a high priced SUV, the Model X. Production was fairly limited over those years as the company grew, but it wasn’t until Tesla introduced the Model 3 in 2017, and Model Y in 2020, that production really started to pick up speed.

Twelve years after the first Roadster was built the 1 millionth car, a red Model Y, rolled off the Fremont production lines in March 2020. While the first million cars took 12 years, the second million was reached just 15 months later. The third million was even quicker, 10 months, followed just 7 months later for the fourth million, and then a little over 6 months for the five millionth car to be built.

Given that timeline, Tesla should build another million cars, and reach six million total cars built in January or February next year.

The speed with which these successive milestones were reached has been thanks to the hard work of crews at the company’s four assembly plants – Fremont, Giga Texas, Giga Berlin, and Giga Shanghai.

This wasn’t the only milestone Tesla reached this week, having also installed the 50,000th Supercharger stall, located in Roseville, California.