Tesla's Road to 1,000,000

12 years after Tesla released its first consumer car, the Roadster, in 2008, the electric car specialist produced its one millionth vehicle. The company’s founder and CEO Elon Musk congratulated his team on reaching that milestone via Twitter on Monday.

After producing very small numbers for many years, Tesla ramped up its production capacity significantly with the release of the lower-cost Model 3. Last year alone, the company made 365,000 cars, exceeding the total number of cars it produced in ten years between 2008 and 2017.

While going from zero to one million cars in little more than a decade is certainly an impressive achievement, yesterday’s milestone illustrates that Tesla is still far off traditional automakers in terms of its output. While Musk’s company has built one million cars since its foundation in 2003, industry leader Volkswagen produces more than 10 million vehicles per year.