#Tesla stock climbs toward new record on strong deliveries

Tesla’s stock price jumped toward a new record early Monday after the company nearly reached its goal of delivering half a million vehicles in 2020.

Shares in the electric-car maker climbed about 2.4 percent to $722.32 in premarket trading as of 7:10 a.m., putting the stock on track to hit a new all-time high after the year’s first opening bell.

The bounce came two days after Tesla reported production and delivery numbers for 2020 that were in line with its internal targets and better than Wall Street expected.

The Silicon Valley giant delivered 499,550 vehicles last year, just shy of its target of 500,000 but ahead of analysts’ estimates of 481,261. Tesla also said it produced 509,737 cars in 2020, roughly 40 percent more than 2019’s levels.

Despite falling slightly short of their delivery goal, Tesla and billionaire CEO Elon Musk rounded up and cast the numbers as a victory. As Tesla put it in a press release, the company “produced and delivered half a million cars” in 2020.

“So proud of the Tesla team for achieving this major milestone!” Musk said on Twitter Saturday. “At the start of Tesla, I thought we had (optimistically) a 10 [percent] chance of surviving at all.”

Tesla said its delivery figures are “slightly conservative” and that the final count could change by as much as 0.5 percent, given that the company only counts a vehicle as delivered “if it is transferred to the customer and all paperwork is correct.”

Monday’s boost to Tesla’s shares continued a dizzying surge for one of the most popular stocks on Wall Street. The share price exploded more than eightfold last year in a rally capped by Tesla’s addition to the S&P 500 index on Dec. 21.

With Post wires