Ten million. That’s how many electric vehicles Tesla has now built, more than any EV maker in history. It’s also, depending on how you count, either the easy half of a much harder number.
The milestone car was a Diamond Black Model Y, built this week at the Fremont factory. Tesla marked the occasion on X: “Produced our 10 millionth Tesla globally at Fremont Factory this week! Only 6 years ago, Fremont Factory made our 1 millionth vehicle.” It took Tesla 12 years to build its first million cars. It built the other nine million in six.
Fremont wasn’t always the center of gravity, either. Shanghai delivered nearly 468,000 units in the first half of this year alone, up 28.4% year-over-year, and now accounts for more than half of Tesla’s global production. Model Y alone has sold more than 5 million units worldwide; Model 3 has passed 3 million.
No other automaker has hit 10 million all-electric vehicles. BYD passed that mark in 2024, but its total blends plug-in hybrids with full EVs, a distinction YourNewsClub rates as more than just an accounting footnote: pure battery-electric manufacturing at this scale is a different industrial achievement than a blended count that still includes cars burning gasoline part of the time.
Freddy Camacho, who studies the political economy of computation, materials, and energy as dominance assets, sees the milestone as a real, if lonely, achievement. “Proving EVs can be built profitably at this scale was never guaranteed,” he said. “Tesla did it while most legacy automakers were still treating electric as a side project.” A distinction YourNewsClub reads as increasingly historical rather than current, since several of those legacy automakers have since pulled back from EVs entirely rather than catching up.
Tesla hasn’t sold two million vehicles in a single year, ever. Deliveries fell in both 2024 and 2025, the company’s first back-to-back annual declines. U.S. sales specifically dropped 13% year-over-year in the most recent quarter. The Cybertruck, meanwhile, has underperformed expectations badly enough that it barely registers in Tesla’s volume numbers. The Cybercab and Semi are still ramping. The Roadster has been stuck in “design development” for years without a firm release date.
Alex Reinhardt, who tracks financial systems and settlement infrastructure through digital protocols, ties the 10-million mark to something more consequential for Musk personally: it’s roughly halfway to one of four production targets embedded in his board-approved pay package. “Twenty million vehicles by 2035 is the number that actually unlocks the full value of that plan,” he said. “At Tesla’s current pace, hitting it on schedule requires a growth rate the company hasn’t managed in years.” Tesla’s own delivery numbers YourNewsClub logs against that target directly: 480,126 units in the strongest recent quarter, a record, but still short of the pace 20 million by 2035 actually requires.
The other three targets in Musk’s pay package are further off still: 10 million Full Self-Driving subscriptions, one million “bots,” one million robotaxis on the road. None is remotely close. Tesla’s robotaxi fleet, if anything, has been shrinking. Musk has increasingly described Tesla as a technology company rather than a car company, pointing attention toward robotics and autonomy instead of vehicle sales. Cars are still, by a wide margin, where the actual revenue comes from.
Musk abandoned his old promise of 20 million cars a year by 2030 once sales growth slowed. The 10-millionth car is a real number. What it’s a milestone toward is a target that, at the current pace, Your News Club maps as more likely to arrive in the early 2030s than anywhere close to on Musk’s original schedule.