Tesla’s Year-End Push Lifts 2020 Deliveries To Musk’s Long-Sought 500,000-Unit Goal

Tesla TSLA closed out 2020 with a final delivery and production push that helped Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company finally deliver about 500,000 cars and crossovers to global customers, a goal the billionaire entrepreneur has been trying to achieve for years. 

The carmaker reported delivering 180,570 vehicles in the quarter that ended Dec. 31, 2020, up 61% from a year ago, raising full-year deliveries to a best-ever 499,550 units. Total production for the year was 509,737, the Silicon Valley-based company said in a statement. Musk has been targeting sales of a half-million electric vehicle sales ever since Tesla purchased its Fremont, California, assembly facility from Toyota in 2010. 

“So proud of the Tesla team for achieving this major milestone! At the start of Tesla, I thought we had (optimistically) a 10% chance of surviving at all,” Musk tweeted early Saturday. 

The addition of the company’s Shanghai plant, which started building Model 3 sedans in January 2020, was critical to hitting the 500,000-unit goal after the COVID-19 pandemic slowed production at both the U.S. and Chinese factories in early 2020. The company doesn’t break out detailed production information so it’s unclear how many units were built in China last year.

Musk sought to goose U.S. sales in the days of 2020, by offering customers a free three-month trial of its so-called Full Self-Driving option. The company charges customers $10,000 for the feature when purchasing new Teslas, although it isn’t yet capable of SAE Level 4 autonomous driving. 

The company didn’t say how many people took it up on the offer.

Tesla’s production capabilities will expand considerably in the next few years as output in Shanghai expands and it opens new plants in Berlin, its first in Europe, and a factory in Austin, Texas, that’s currently under construction. China sales should also expand in 2021 as the company said it’s about to start delivering Model Y electric crossovers in that market, produced in Shanghai. 

“In a nutshell, Tesla had a high bar to hit for 4Q and impressively exceeded the Street coming within its 500k delivery target for the year, an eye-popping performance to finish the year,” Daniel Ives, an equity analyst for Wedbush Securities, said in a research note. “The EV industry has massive tailwinds into 2021 which will benefit vendors across the board, with Tesla in prime position to further catapult itself in the EV landscape with China front and center.”

The company will release detailed financial results for the fourth quarter in the next few weeks. Tesla shares, which rose more than 700% in 2020, closed at $705.67 on Dec. 31. That surge, combined with massive stock awards Musk received in 2020, has pushed the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s net worth to $155.6 billion, Forbes estimates.