So Tesla put out their Q4 numbers a couple days ago and I can't stop thinking about one detail buried in the press release: they delivered 499,550 cars in all of 2020. Elon had been promising 500,000 for basically the entire year. They missed it by 450 cars.
- Out of half a million. That's a rounding error, that's like three days of production at Fremont, and it's just barely enough to turn "we hit our goal" into "we didn't." I keep picturing some poor ops person at Gigafactory Shanghai on December 31st doing math in their head, watching the number tick up and just... running out of hours.
I get why this is the kind of thing I'd fixate on instead of something bigger. I've made a version of that same mistake with my own dumb yearly goals more times than I want to admit: I had a "read 40 books in 2020" thing going in Goodreads and landed on 38, and there is genuinely no difference between 38 and 40 except that one number feels like success and the other feels like almost. Round numbers are a trap we build for ourselves and then get mad at when we don't clear them.
Anyway. The actual breakdown: 442,511 were Model 3/Y, and 57,039 were Model S/X, which tells you pretty plainly where the company's actual business is at this point. The cheaper cars are the company now, the S and X are basically a boutique product line at this stage. Total production for the year came in a little higher than deliveries, around 509,737, which is normal, there's always cars in transit or sitting on a boat somewhere between "built" and "in a driveway." Given that 2020 had a pandemic in it, a shutdown of the Fremont plant for something like two months in spring, and Elon having a very public spat with local officials about reopening it early, getting anywhere near 500k at all is honestly kind of nuts. This is a company that in 2019 delivered 367,500 cars. That's a 36% jump in a year where the whole industry basically stopped for two months.
The stock, meanwhile, does not care one bit about 450 cars. Tesla closed out the year having gone up something like 700%, and it's been on an absolute tear into the new year too — it's a company that's currently valued like it's already won a war it's still only fighting the first battle of. I'm not going to pretend I understand what the market thinks Tesla's worth or why, I just find it funny that the stock price conversation and the "did they hit their own number" conversation are happening in completely different universes right now. One is a spreadsheet with a missing 450, the other is people writing "to the moon" under stock charts.
The other thing rattling around in my head this week, only tangentially related, is that CES is going to be all-digital in a few days, first time in over 50 years the thing hasn't happened in person in Vegas. No show floor, no walking past a booth with a robot vacuum shaped like a face for no reason, none of it. I've never actually been to CES myself, I've only ever experienced it through other people's liveblogs and photos of weird gadgets, so I'm curious whether a virtual version even translates. Half of what makes CES coverage fun every year is the sheer randomness of what gets photographed — a smart toilet next to a foldable TV next to a company selling a $400 electric fork. Hard to get that same chaos energy from a Zoom keynote.
Back to Tesla though, because I want to end on the number that actually got me writing this. 450 cars. If you're the kind of person who cares about narrative shape more than substance (and a lot of the market clearly is, given the stock chart), you'd almost rather see a company miss a big round target by a wide margin than by a hair. Missing by 40,000 tells you something. Missing by 450 tells you the number was basically arbitrary in the first place, and everyone agreed to pretend it wasn't.