Tesla drops reference to its goal of delivering 20 million vehicles per year in its impact report

(Reuters) – Tesla left out its goal of delivering 20 million vehicles a year by 2030 in its latest impact report, another sign the company is tempering its automotive ambitions with a focus on robo-taxis .

Musk said in 2020 that Tesla aspired to sell 20 million vehicles by the end of the current decade, nearly twice as many as those sold by Toyota, the world’s largest automaker.

“Our goal is to build and deliver 20 million vehicles per year by 2030. To achieve this goal, we must make our products even more accessible,” the company said, while reiterating this goal in its report. impact 2022.

However, Musk and the company have changed tack, focusing on self-driving technology as the company’s main growth driver, with the automaker set to unveil its robotaxi, dubbed “Cybercab,” on August 8.

CEO Elon Musk said last month that Tesla would use its current product lines for new affordable vehicles, as it backed away from more ambitious plans to produce an all-new model expected to cost $25,000. The company’s shares fell about 2% on Thursday.

After years of growing at breakneck speed, Tesla is hitting a speed bump as demand for electric vehicles slows and competition heats up. In a bid to restructure, the electric vehicle maker has laid off more than 10% of its staff to focus on robo-taxis, humanoid robots and autonomous technology.

Reuters first reported in April that Tesla had canceled the long-promised cheap car that investors had been counting on to grow it into a mainstream automaker, focusing instead on robo-taxis.

Tesla’s sales surge and a series of price cuts allowed it to deliver 1.81 million vehicles last year, up 38% from 2022, but well below the growth target long-term growth rate of 50% that Musk set for himself three years ago.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Hyunjoo Jin in San Francisco; editing by Anil D’Silva)