Big or Bust, with IRA this has government support written all...

Big or Bust, with IRA this has government support written all over it, maybe the reason for so many snouts in the trough.

Musk's audacious goal of selling 20 million electric vehicles in 2030 is at the center of the company's growth promise for shareholders and its pledge to drive the adoption of sustainable energy. If achieved, it would make Tesla twice the size of any automaker in history, accounting for roughly 20% of the global vehicle market.

But such exponential growth - a 13-fold increase over the estimated 1.5 million vehicles it hopes to sell this year - will come at an unprecedented cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, according to a Reuters analysis of Tesla's financial disclosures and forecasts for global electric vehicle demand, EV battery and battery mineral production.

Along the way, Tesla would need to build seven or eight more "gigafactories" - an average of one every 12 months or so - take share from every competitor and emerge as a company the size of Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) and Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) combined. It would also need about 30 times as much battery capacity to supply all of its vehicle factories.

The price tag will be steep: Tesla could spend an estimated $400 billion or more over the next eight years to build new vehicle assembly and battery plants around the globe, and another $200 billion or more to build or buy the batteries, including the cost of the raw materials.

Canada, Indonesia, India and other governments are already lobbying to win Tesla's next investment in EV production, an announcement Musk has said could come by the end of the year.

Producing 20 million vehicles a year would require Tesla to expand both its own battery-making capacity, and the capacity of its battery partners and the raw materials producers that supply them.

"Long-term, we're expecting to make on the order of 3,000 gigawatt hours or 3 terawatt hours per year," Musk told investors in July. "I think we've got a good chance of achieving this actually before 2030, but I'm highly confident that we could do it by 2030."

Tesla's current battery production capacity is 100 gigawatt-hours.

Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, which tracks the global EV battery industry, expects that Tesla will require 2.0 million tons of lithium, 1.3 million tons of nickel, 0.2 million tons of cobalt and 3.5 million tons of graphite to support production in 2030 of 3.0 terawatt-hours of battery production.

That is four times as much lithium and nickel, twice as much cobalt and seven times as much graphite as the entire EV industry expects to consume in 2022.

Benchmark describes the 2030 targets as "highly ambitious."