Tesla delivered nearly 1 million vehicles in 2021, almost twice as many as in the previous year, results that were better than expected despite global supply challenges.

The U.S. electric carmaker delivered more than 936,000 cars of all models last year, an increase of 87 percent over the previous year, the company said in a statement on Sunday.

Tesla had announced last January that it was aiming to increase deliveries by 50 percent per year over several years, so Sunday's results far exceeded that goal.

The group, which recently moved its headquarters from Palo Alto, California to Austin, Texas, sold 911,208 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles as well as 24,964 vehicles of its luxury S and X models (at a price of $90,000 and $100,000 respectively).

In the fourth quarter alone, Tesla delivered 308,600 cars.
As of November 2021, Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory delivered 413,283 vehicles, up 242 percent from the same period a year before, according to the company's data.

Tesla has built more than 1,000 supercharging stations, 8,000 supercharging piles and 700 destination charging stations on the Chinese mainland.

The company has managed to overcome global logistics issues that have plagued the auto industry.

The company's chief Elon Musk previously said he was able to get around much of the semiconductor shortage by using new chip designs and rewriting software.

Tesla got another boost in October when it received an order for 100,000 electric vehicles from the rental company Hertz, to be completed by the end of 2022. This announcement brought the automaker into the very select club of companies worth more than $1 trillion on the stock market.
Tesla, however, finds itself under scrutiny from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is probing its autopilot system over safety concerns.

The automaker has also agreed to update its software to prevent drivers from playing video games on the car's system while the vehicle is in motion, following a government safety investigation.

(With input from Reuters, Xinhua)