Tesla missed the sales target of half a million cars by a hair in 2020. Nonetheless, it was a record year for the American company as the total number of cars sold grew by 36 percent compared to 2019.
Over the past year, CEO Elon Musk set the goal to deliver half a million cars. That seemed almost an impossible task, because Tesla had to close a gap of about 180,000 cars in the fourth quarter. To illustrate: in the fourth quarter of 2019, Tesla delivered 112,000 cars. Despite the troubles surrounding the corona virus, Tesla has managed to produce 179,757 cars and deliver 180,570 cars in the fourth quarter of 2020. This means that the total number of cars produced in 2020 with 509,737 copies will exceed half a million, but the number of deliveries will remain at 499,550 cars. In the last few days of the year, Tesla tried to boost that number even further, including by temporarily offering ‘Full Self Driving’ for free.
Tesla sold 367,500 cars in 2019, so the company managed to achieve 36 percent growth in deliveries by 2020. Tesla has not yet released any profit figures. It is expected to be presented early next month. The market value of Tesla is certainly worth it with a value of more than $ 700 (€ 570) per share. For the coming year, Tesla already has one new ambitious goal: to make ‘Full Self Driving’ available to its customers.
Elon Musk expresses his joy on Twitter. “So proud that the Tesla team has reached this big milestone! When starting up Tesla, I thought (optimistically) we had a 10 percent chance of surviving at all,” he says.