In just a short 21 years of existence, and only 16 since it began production of the first Tesla Roadster, Tesla has now already made its sixth millionth car – a figure that’s already fairly impressive by its own right, but even more so when the last million have only rolled off the production line in the past six months or so, and another million the six months before that.
The milestone was announced in a post on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter. According to the accompanying video, the sixth millionth car – unsurprisingly – comes in the form of a Tesla Model Y, finished in Stealth Grey. Impressively, the same model also helped Tesla reach its one-million-unit milestone back in 2020.
Car number six million was made in the company’s Fremont factory – a fitting place to celebrate the milestone as it was also the company’s first “high volume” assembly line, having served as the site for the Model S with an initial “aspirational capacity” of just 20,000 vehicles per year according to Tesla Vice President of Finance Sendil Palani.
Prior to the Fremont factory, Tesla’s ‘production facility’ was just out the back of its retail and service outlet in Menlo Park, California, where it hand-assembled some 2,400 Roadsters over five years.
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Tesla was named the world’s best-selling EV brand last year, with over 1.8 million units delivered worldwide. Some 96.2% of that figure is contributed by the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y, with the latter being the more popular model. Competition for the honours have been rife, though, with chief rival BYD having overtaken the American brand in EV sales in the last quarter of 2023.
BYD said that it delivered some 300,114 fully electric cars to customers in the first three months of the year after sales slipped in the first two months of the year. Tesla has yet to publish its sales report for Q1 2024, although several analysts have revised down their projections after reports of a cutback in production at its Shanghai Gigafactory.
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