Tesla has high hopes for the next two years, as the electric car company projects it will produce half a million cars in 2018.
During its quarterly earnings call, Tesla announced that engineering on its Model 3 is almost complete, with the final release for tooling expected to be complete by June, followed by a part manufacture and validation process that should have the upcoming car in production by July 2017.
While the Model 3 is designed with easy manufacture in mind, the company's goals are still ambitious.
Tesla hopes to jump production from an estimated 90,000 cars this year to 200,000 in just the span of a year, and then more than doubling that to 500,000 in 2018...and doubling down again to a cool million cars produced in 2020.
Did we mention that at the time of writing, Tesla has only one factory producing cars right now? Excluding Tesla's Gigafactory - which only makes batteries - the company's Fremont production site has historically capped out at 312,000 cars a year back in the heyday of the Toyota Corolla, Matrix and Pontiac Vibe.
While the company is no stranger to going into overdrive - having just increased production of its Model X from 507 to 2,659 in the span of two quarters - Tesla recognizes that its 2018 plan is no small feat.
"Increasing production five fold over the next two years will be challenging and will likely require some additional capital," notes Tesla in its shareholder report, "but this is our goal and we will be working hard to achieve it."
Needless to say, Elon Musk is either a) talking a big talk in hopes that investors don't ask for the walk, b) hiding some kind of revolutionary production process or secret factory, c) making the Model 3 out of Lego, or d) planning to run the company down to the ground, take off with the money, and run off into space in one of his rockets.
