EVwire brief: Elon Musk said on Tesla's Q3 2026 earnings call minutes ago, that the company is aiming for 5 million vehicles a year by 2030.
Tesla delivered 1,636,129 vehicles in 2025, so the target is a bit more than triple last year. It is also about 2.8 times Tesla's best year so far, 2023, when it delivered 1,808,581.
Getting there from 2025 means growing deliveries by roughly 25% a year, five years running. The last time Tesla grew faster than that was in 2023.
The target comes in a quarter where Tesla says orders aren't what's holding it back. Its Q3 2026 Update says it ended September with its largest passenger vehicle backlog in four years, and that battery supply capped how many cars it could build:
"We ended the quarter with the largest backlog for our passenger vehicles in four years. [...] While battery availability continued to be the limiting factor in increasing auto volumes in the quarter, we have made additional progress in securing future supply, as we work toward our goal of maximum utilization of our factories."
Tesla currently has >2,525,000 vehicles worth of manufacturing capacity installed across its factories, which means Musk says this will double by 2030.
from Q3 shareholder deck
Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, down 2.1% from a year earlier, and built 464,391. Through the first nine months of 2026 it has delivered 1,324,681 vehicles, up 8.8% on the 1,217,902 it delivered in the same stretch of 2025.
The deck also lists record quarterly deliveries in Canada, Australia, Japan and Taiwan, record production at Giga Berlin, and the 10 millionth Tesla produced and delivered.
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Details: This is how the new target looks like compared to Tesla’s annual deliveries this far:
Context:
Some of the next step towards production increase is already on paper. Tesla is preparing permits for a second Giga Berlin hall that would take the plant toward 1 million vehicles a year, with construction possibly starting in 2027.
The date has moved before, too. At Tesla's shareholder meeting in November 2025, Musk talked about reaching around 5 million a year by the end of 2028. Tesla's impact reports once carried a goal of 20 million vehicles a year by 2030, a line it dropped in 2024.
What counts as a vehicle may matter, too.
Tesla's 2025 CEO Performance Award has a milestone of 20 million cumulative deliveries, and the metric counts unsupervised Robotaxis Tesla puts into commercial operation in its own fleet, not just cars sold to customers.
By that count Tesla is at ~10.2 million today, cumulatively. Cybercabs started giving rides in Austin on September 3, and Tesla had registered 349 of them in Texas by mid-October.
Sources: Tesla Q3 2026 Update; Tesla Q3 2026 deliveries; Tesla Q4 2025 deliveries; Tesla Q4 2024 deliveries; Tesla Q4 2023 deliveries; Tesla 2025 CEO Performance Award
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