Tesla (IW 500/384), what originally was considered by many to be a pipe dream of a wealthy entrepreneur, now is set to produce a few million cars per year by 2025, according to CEO and Co-founder Elon Musk.
That’s well ahead of Musk’s previously stated goal of 500,000 cars per year by 2025.
“I think we’re going to just keep driving our volume as high as we can,” Musk said during the 2015 Automotive News World Congress in Detroit. “Our mission is fundamentally to transition the world to electric cars.”
Yet it is just that production of vehicles that has hindered Tesla.
“Tesla has been production limited since we came out with the Model S,” Musk said. “Most of our focus is on production growth as opposed to demand generation.”
The company already has sold out of all of the Model S cars it could “possibly make” in 2015, Musk said.
While Tesla has been able to increase its weekly production rate 100% in the past year, it still is limited by its production capabilities. And Musk wants to double Tesla’s production rate from the beginning of 2015 to the end of 2016.
That’s with the long awaited Model X, Tesla's full-size crossover utility vehicle, hitting showrooms this summer.
To help meet that demand, Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada is set to come online in the next few years.
But Musk has plans beyond that.
He expects to eventually build production facilities in Asia and Europe and to build another plant in the United States, closer to the East Coast.
The company already sells in 34 countries, and building production facilities closer to the demand makes sense, Musk said.
