Tesla Almost Reaches 500,000 Car Delivery Target For 2020 Despite Pandemic | Technology

Tesla has announced record deliveries of its electric cars in the last three months of 2020, on the verge of hitting the half-million-year target set by chief executive Elon Musk.

The Californian automaker’s annual sales rose 36% after a final quarter that exceeded analysts’ expectations, to a total of 499,550 cars in 2020.

Tesla delivered 180,570 electric vehicles between October and December, slightly below the overall target Musk set himself at the start of the year, before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

Covid-19 forced the Fremont assembly plant in the United States to shut down this spring, but Musk urged employees to increase production to meet the target, and last week offered incentives, including Free ‘autonomous driving’ options worth $ 10,000 (£ 7,300) on Tesla cars with paperwork and delivery completed in the last days of December.

Although it apparently missed the target, Tesla said it had “produced and delivered half a million vehicles, per our latest recommendations,” and Musk hailed it as a “major milestone.”

He tweeted: “So proud of the Tesla team for taking this major step! At the start of Tesla, we thought we had (hopefully) a 10% chance of surviving. “

More than 509,000 cars were manufactured by the automaker in 2020. Production of its Model Y SUV has also started at its Chinese plant in Shanghai, with deliveries scheduled to begin shortly, Tesla said.

Tesla’s share price, which rose eightfold in 2020, ended the year at over $ 705, valuing the company at $ 669 billion – of which 20 percent is owned by Musk himself, who is the second richest man in the world. It overtook Toyota earlier in the year as the world’s most valuable automaker and joined the prestigious Wall Street S&P Index last month, immediately becoming its sixth publicly traded company.