Excerpt from cleantechnica.com
Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared some thoughts in a recent interview with Financial Times on Tesla’s aspiration to reach the goal of 20 million electric cars produced annually by 2030. Peter Campbell asked Elon Musk what the business would look like by 2030 to make 20 million EVs per year. After pointing out that this wasn’t a forum for announcing new Tesla products, Elon Musk said,
“The 20 million by 2030 is an aspiration, not a promise. And the reason for aiming for something like that is there are approximately two billion cars and trucks in the world and for us to really make a dent in sustainable energy and electrification, I think we need to replace at least one percent of the fleet per year to really be meaningful. And that’s where the 20 million units comes from.
“Let’s try to replace one percent of the global fleet of two billion cars and trucks per year. That’s our aspiration. It’s not a promise; it’s an aspiration. I think we’ve got a good chance of getting there and people will see based on the products that we unveil — will be able to judge for themselves whether that goal is realistic or not.”
Although Elon Musk emphasized that this Tesla target is aspirational, Tesla’s been working towards this goal for some time now and just recently opened two new gigafactories.
During Tesla’s 2021 Annual Shareholder meeting, Tesla’s Chairman of the Board Robyn Denholm spoke about this goal. She recapped the previous year in which Tesla had delivered over 800,000 vehicles, had started new production lines in Shanghai, and had achieved other milestones before leading up to the goal of 20 million EVs per year by 2030, which Tesla initially disclosed in its 2020 Impact Report.