Elon Musk doesn’t just want to build a million-person colony on Mars, he also has ambitions for Tesla to build 20 “maybe 10 million” EVs per year by the 2030s. However, that figure does sound like ‘Elon speak’. The Tesla CEO often makes outlandish statements. Even Wall Street analysts, who are the most gullible financial analysts out there, paused for breath on the 20 million Teslas per year target. Maybe Musk isn’t as crazy as his ambitious growth plans look. We can take a look a very simple stats.

Tesla was founded in 2003, last year the company made 1 million Teslas. That’s 18 years to reach the 1 million annual production rate. So if it’s taken 18 years for Tesla to reach 1 million annual production rate, how is it going to achieve 20 “maybe 10” million EVs by the 2030s?

Tesla currently has two production sites, California and Shanghai. The California site produces 600K cars per year, Shanghai produces 450K cars per year. California and Shanghai will soon expand production facilities. Meanwhile, Tesla has just opened a new gigafactory in Berlin, Germany and another one is in development for Texas.

Berlin and Texas are expected to have a combined annual production capacity of 900,000 EVs per year by 2025. Obviously, to reach that 10-20 million EVs per year goal Tesla will have to construct more gigafactories. Indeed, Tesla is already looking to build a second factory in China.

It takes about 12 months to build a Tesla gigafactory and a further 12-24 months to reach full production capacity. So two maybe three years in total, excluding delays. Even with those simple numbers, it appears the 10-20 million target is way over-ambitious.

As a guess, a 5 million annual production rate by the 2030s seems more realistic. However, according to Elon Musk on Twitter, Tesla has a masterplan up its sleeves:

“Tesla will be scaling to extreme size…” Musk said on Twitter.

Speaking at the launch of the Tesla Berlin Gigafactory, Elon Musk said:

“I think it’s aggressive, but not impossible, that we could do 20 million cars in 10 years. And that would be a good number because there’s 2 billion cars and trucks in the world that are in active use. So, 20 million would be then 1 percent of the global fleet per year.”