Impact Report 2023 reveals Tesla’s 2030 sales targets cancelled

Tesla has published its Impact Report for the year 2023. The detailed report describes the environmental impact of the Tesla product ecosystem and operations over the past year and contains a number of interesting facts and figures. However, there is no longer a 2030 sales figure in it, unlike the previous reports.

The oft-repeated goal was to sell 20 million vehicles a year by 2030. Based on today’s figures, Tesla would have sold more cars in just a few years than Volkswagen and Toyota combined. Tesla has achieved an enormous and unprecedented development in sales and has gone from a small niche car manufacturer to an established manufacturer on par with Audi in just a few years. However, the target announced in 2020 for the end of the decade was already considered extremely ambitious at the time.

“Our goal is to build and deliver 20 million vehicles a year by 2030,” Elon Musk stated. “To achieve this goal, we need to make our products even more accessible.”

The sales target for 2023 was always stated in the Tesla sustainability report, even in the 2022 edition. The annual reports spoke of increasing sales by 50 per cent each year in the medium term. For 2023, this target was not quite achieved, with sales increasing by “only” 38 per cent. Nevertheless, Tesla achieved the best result in the company’s history with 1.81 million units in 2023.

The news agency Reuters suspects that the latest strategic shift at Tesla is behind the cancelled sales target for 2030: Elon Musk has shifted the focus away from pure volume growth and towards autonomous driving. Rumours have been circulating for months that Tesla has put the development of the high-volume compact model on hold and will instead present a vehicle designed for autonomous driving. Tesla plans to reveal details of this vehicle on 8 August.

The electric drive is also a given for the potential robotaxi. In the impact report, Tesla calculates that each vehicle delivered by the brand will save 51 tonnes of CO2 equivalents over its useful life – including emissions from production.

reuters.com, tesla.com (PDF), x.com