That said, I have a few friends who bought it's shares and their rationale is that it's a "clean energy play", far bigger than cars and that their brand is going to be as valuable as Apple. Only time will tell I guess, everyone can put their money where their mouth is and shorting Tesla has been a pretty bad proposition so far.
P.S. I'm not trying to convince anyone here of Tesla's value, I've shared some of my thoughts before, and there are plenty other people who have done a thorough job detailing the ecosystem and its potential.
First Tesla is growing fast so that $50k will drastically go down in the coming years.
Tesla is more vertically integrated so you have to include the valuation of all the dealerships, parts of their suppliers, the charging network, ...
And third there are the “other” businesses like the battery storage, solar roofs, software revenue, ...
So overall the numbers of cars produced is probably too simplistic to compare them.
Tesla with a 2% market share in the US, is valued more than Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, General Motors, and BMW combined (40% of the domestic market).
Toyota makes about $2,500 profit for every car sold. Tesla would need to make $50,000 per unit sold on average, or basically 100% profit on a Model 3, to justify the market cap.