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Tesla’s goal of producing 1 million cars per year is closer than everyone thinks
In classic Tesla fashion, Elon Musk shared an almost insane goal back in 2016. While speaking with analysts in a conference call, Musk remarked that he believes Tesla has a shot at achieving a production rate of 1 million cars a year. This statement was met with much criticism, considering that just the year prior, Tesla delivered just over 50,500 vehicles.
As the US auto industry is starting what could very well be a long road to recovery from a pandemic, it is starting to become evident that Musk’s goal may end up being feasible after all.
The year has been cruel to the automotive industry. Back in April, North American car factories that are known to produce about a million vehicles a month ended up producing fewer than 5,000 units. But while the year has been painful for the car industry, some recovery started becoming evident in recent months. Just last month, some large automakers reported sales that beat their 2019 numbers, hinting that an upswing may be on the way.
Amidst this trend is the one outlier in the US auto industry: Tesla. The electric car maker has felt the full brunt of the pandemic, as shown in the extended closure of its Fremont Factory from mid-March to mid-May. Despite this, the company was able to show a profitable second quarter, and this past Q3, it delivered a record 139,300 vehicles, up 50% from Q2 2020. The company also produced 145,036 cars in the third quarter, up 76% from the second quarter.
What is rather remarkable is that Tesla has decided to stand by its initial goal of delivering half a million cars this 2020. This target was already ambitious without the pandemic. With the pandemic, the company’s refusal to adjust its delivery targets seems downright insane. Yet if the company’s Q3 and potential Q4 results are any indication, Tesla may actually be closer to its 1-million-car-per-year goal than expected.
Tesla has delivered about 318,000 vehicles so far this year. For Tesla to meet its goal of delivering 500,000 vehicles in 2020, the company would have to deliver over 180,000 cars in the fourth quarter. This is yet another record for the company, and it is one that would likely be challenging. RBC Capital Markets analyst Joseph Spak, in a statement to The New York Times, noted that while 500,000 cars is “not an unattainable goal,” achieving it now “seems increasingly difficult.”
Yet despite these challenges, the fact that Tesla seems to be in striking distance of its pre-pandemic 2020 delivery goal represents an incredibly notable shift for the company. Just a little over a year ago, after all, Tesla was a much different automaker. It was still an embattled EV company, seemingly scrambling to raise money while TSLA short-sellers circled like sharks smelling blood in the water. Tesla ultimately proved its critics wrong, posting four profitable quarters as of Q2 2020.
If Tesla could come close or achieve its goal of producing and delivering over 180,000 vehicles in Q4 2020, the company would only be 70,000 cars short of a 250,000-vehicle-per-quarter run-rate. Once that is achieved, hitting 1 million cars per year in both production and deliveries will only be a matter of time. Granted, this is a rather ambitious step, but one must note that Tesla is pretty much taking on 2020 with just one and a half factories.
Today, Tesla only produces cars in two sites: the Fremont Factory and Gigafactory Shanghai. And even then, Giga Shanghai is not yet fully ramped, with the facility yet to start Model Y production and the Model 3 line has only started operating with 3 shifts. This means that this year, Tesla has pursued its ambitious goals with a main factory in the US that was closed for over a month and a Chinese plant whose Phase 1 is now just hitting its stride.
These circumstances will likely change by next year. Tesla is in the process of building two new vehicle production facilities: Gigafactory Berlin and Gigafactory Texas. Both facilities are designed to produce high-volume vehicles, with the German plant manufacturing the Model Y and Texas building the Cybertruck, a vehicle that has received well over half a million orders, as per remarks from CEO Elon Musk.
Of course, Tesla’s production and deliveries still only comprise a small part of the auto market. Yet despite this, the company’s rapid rise and the equally quick emergence of the electric vehicle sector means that Tesla is poised to dominate an industry that is still forming. Michelle Krebs, an executive editor at Cox Automotive, a market research firm, said it best in a statement to the NYT.
“Tesla is the EV market right now. It’s still a tiny part of the market, and they are going to face more competition, but they are now well established,” she said.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s Boring Company has big plans for Las Vegas by year’s end
Elon Musk’s Boring Company says Vegas Loop stations will double by year end once again.
The Boring Company says the Vegas Loop’s station count will double by the end of the year, tying the target to a hiring push for drivers and operations managers in Las Vegas. “Vegas Loop is getting bigger – the station count will double by end of year!” the company wrote in a post on X, attaching listings for a Loop driver and a senior Loop operations manager.
The number checks out against what’s already public, with the Vegas Loop currently running 14 operational stations, while the Boring Company’s own project page lists 28 as the target for the end of 2026.
Vegas Loop is getting bigger – the station count will double by end of year!
Urgently hiring exceptional and enthusiastic Drivers and Ops Managers.
Apply here!
Driverhttps://t.co/ZUPXBYTONb
Senior Loop Ops Managerhttps://t.co/mV6V22V8jH pic.twitter.com/IZ9FqIw8WY
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) September 14, 2026
Much of that growth is tied to tunnels that are already built and waiting on an opening date. A roughly two-mile dual tunnel system under Paradise Road, connecting Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, is expected to open in stages over the coming weeks, Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority chief executive Steve Hill told the Review-Journal last week. New stations at 4744 Paradise, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, and the former Gordon Biersch site would come online with it, several of them built to speed up rides to Harry Reid International Airport ahead of Formula 1’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Clark County entitled Vegas Loop for 123 stations after approving 19 more in August, as Teslarati reported at the time. Entitlement and construction move at different speeds on this project, so county approval alone does not guarantee a station opens on any particular schedule.
Clark County approved 18 additional stations back in 2023, part of a plan that pushed the system’s target to 69 stations across 65 miles, doubling the network on paper for the first time. The target kept climbing after that, to roughly 93 stations by the end of that year and 104 by last year, before August’s vote pushed it to 123. This week’s announcement is the first time that doubling language has been attached to stations actually running rather than stations merely approved on a county map.
Ridership gives some sense of what a denser network could carry. Boring Company executive Mike Baier said in July that the Vegas Loop already moves around 40,000 passengers on busy convention days, a total that tops most light rail systems in the country despite the system running on a fraction of its planned tunnel mileage. Company leadership has projected ridership could triple or quadruple once the airport connector tunnels fully open.
Boring Company did not say which stations beyond those already under construction would open by year end, or whether the hiring push points to a fleet expansion alongside the new stops.
Tesla is looking to expand into a new Asian market, strengthening its presence in a region that has been bullish on electric vehicles as a whole.
Tesla officially filed to establish a subsidiary of its business in Vietnam, a report from Reuters suggests. Tesla named the entity “Tesla Motors Vietnam Limited Liability Company.”
The planned entrance into the Vietnamese market is a good sign and move for Tesla, as it has become one of the fastest-growing EV markets in Southeast Asia. It is already among the leaders in the region in both volume and electrification rate. In the first half of this year, Vietnam led Southeast Asia in battery-electric passenger car sales at about 116,000 units, up about 71 percent year over year.
Currently, Vietnamese EV drivers rely on VinFast’s V-Green network, which has about 150,000 ports, but these are primarily reserved for VinFast vehicles. Public third-party charging is fragmented and unreliable for those who do not own chargers that are dedicated to a certain manufacturer’s vehicles.
Tesla has had mixed results in Asia as a whole, and as China remains the core part of its story in Asia, the company is evidently working on expanding its footprint on the continent. Tesla’s domestic retail deliveries fell about 12 percent year over year through the first eight months of 2026.
Model Y remains a standout individual product, holding its position as one of, if not the, best-selling vehicles in the world. However, Model 3 has been weaker than it has been in past years.
Gigafactory Shanghai, the company’s Chinese production facility, still performs very well. Wholesale volumes in terms of exports have more than doubled and now exceed domestic retail sales; Giga Shanghai builds vehicles for Europe, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and other markets. South Korea has been an explicit bright spot, with registrations doubling year-to-date and Tesla frequently appearing as the top imported brand.
Tesla just did something in South Korea that no foreign carmaker has ever done
Tesla’s entrance into Vietnam signals a broader effort to take over the Asian market and grab more market share from rivals.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s companies made up with Apple but OpenAI still on the hook
Elon Musk’s X Corp and SpaceXAI dropped their Apple antitrust suit, leaving OpenAI as defendant.
X Corp and SpaceXAI, Elon Musk’s social platform and AI venture, have dropped Apple from the antitrust lawsuit that they filed against the iPhone maker and OpenAI last year. In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, attorneys for X and SpaceXAI moved to dismiss the Apple portion of the case, first reported by Reuters. The filing does not explain why the companies are dropping Apple or say whether a settlement was reached.
X and SpaceXAI say they intend to keep pursuing the case against OpenAI, which remains a defendant. That resolves the dispute with one company while leaving the core allegation intact against the other, with no public accounting of what changed in between.
The lawsuit dates to August 2025, when xAI and X sued Apple and OpenAI, arguing that Apple’s decision to make ChatGPT the only generative AI chatbot built into iOS gave OpenAI an unfair structural advantage. The complaint claimed ChatGPT controlled roughly 80 percent of the chatbot market at the time, while Grok held only a few percent. It sought billions of dollars in damages and asked the court to unwind the arrangement.
Elon Musk’s xAI and X file antitrust suit against Apple and OpenAI over AI exclusivity
The filing followed weeks of Musk publicly complaining that Grok and X weren’t appearing in Apple’s “Must Have” App Store section, though Grok ranked second in the Productivity category and X ranked first in News at the time. He accused Apple of “playing politics” and warned of immediate legal action before following through days later.
Apple and OpenAI tried to get the case thrown out, but a federal judge denied both motions in November, ruling the dispute was better suited to summary judgment than an early dismissal. That decision sent the case into discovery, which is presumably what led to Monday’s filing.
Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either 𝕏 or Grok in your “Must Have” section when 𝕏 is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?
Are you playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know. https://t.co/3wenLZGtwG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2025
The timing is notable given how Musk’s sentiment toward Apple has shifted, with Musk noting that he was open to letting Grok power a revamped Siri after a user suggested Apple replace its aging assistant with xAI’s model.
xAI, the AI venture Musk folded into X Corp last year, has since combined with SpaceX under the SpaceXAI brand. That structure now puts X, Grok and SpaceX’s rocket and satellite businesses under one roof as Musk pushes his AI ambitions beyond chatbots.
OpenAI remains the sole defendant going forward, and Musk’s companies have not said if there’s any changes to those original claims. Apple and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing.
Elon Musk’s Boring Company has big plans for Las Vegas by year’s end
Tesla looks to expand into new Asian market, strengthening presence
