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Tesla Badly Misses Model 3 Production Goals (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): Tesla badly missed its goal of building 1,500 Model 3 cars in the third quarter, the first sign that the production ramp-up for the new sedan isn't going as smoothly as planned. The Silicon Valley electric-car maker built 260 of the Model 3s between July and September, the company said Monday in a statement. In August, the auto maker predicted it would build more than 1,500 Model 3s before cranking up production to 5,000 a week by the end of the fourth quarter. Tesla blamed "production bottlenecks" for the weaker production. "It is important to emphasize that there are no fundamental issues with the Model 3 production or supply chain," Tesla said in a statement. "We understand what needs to be fixed and we are confident of addressing the manufacturing bottleneck issues in the near-term."
Computers got better and we have 3D printers now? Isn't this the post-Luddite post-scarcity 3D printed virtual AI space future I was promised?
Am I still going to retire on Mars?
Paid shills from the big car companies. Paid shills from the big oil companies. People with investments in the big car and/oil companies. People who hate successful people. Idiots who believe there's nothing bad with burning coal and oil. The list goes on...
#DeleteFacebook
In what world is missing predicted goals by 50% okay? Given that Tesla has been in business for nearly 10 years, and they've been mass-producing cars for 5 years, they should have figured things out by now. For some reason Tesla is treated as a start-up, even though they've been around a very long time now. Investors should be worried.
Bottlenecks in a production line are extremely difficult to address. There's been tons of excellent books about it (such as The Goal) but it remains a major issue in companies with a normal growth so it's not surprising to see Tesla struggling with that given their insane expansion pace.
I spent years in the manufacturing world and countless times I've seen stuff like HR authorizing crazy overtime in the weeks following a layoff or plant managers scrambling to rent containers to store surplus of a part that was backorder the week before. You got JIT? Next thing you know Texas is blown away and gas prices skyrocket, making parts more expensive to get delivered. You decide to build up inventory? Real estate prices go up and you end up paying top dollar for low quality warehouses.
Supply chain, project management and interest rates: all examples of things that are too complex for the human mind to fully comprehend.
lucm, indeed.
Tesla is basically trying to compress +100 years of automobile development, infrastructure, manufacturing, and marketing within the span of about a few years, all while trying to rewrite the book. They have no where near the number of facilities(companies like Ford have 100s of acres of facilities dedicated solely for testing out transmissions, gearboxes, etc. To say nothing of their factories) or dealerships(there's like only 1 within 50 miles of where I live). They're also hemorrhaging money due to said breakneck expansion.
They do have an excellent PR however that's been able to convince enough investors(or donors, depending on your perspective) to keep dropping money on the company despite plenty of reports noting that they aren't really do very well.
That said, you could argue that Tesla has achieved it's goal of convincing people to want EVs, and other companies to start developing their own. I doubt Tesla will ever really break out of its status as a small time car company though, and it's overvalued stock may come to bite investors in the ass.
Presumably conflicting with the paid shills from Tesla, and the idiots who believe Saint Elon can do no wrong.
You could call it "missing goals by 50%". You could also say it's a delay of less than one month, since their original plan was about 100 cars in august and 1500 in September. All of a sudden it doesn't look nearly as bad, does it?
I'm wanting to know what sort of idiot people who make these arguments believes exists - what sort of congenital moron sees "Subsidies will be expiring in 6 months!" ".... in 5 months!" "... 4 months!" "... 3... 2... 1.... Okay, subsidies just expired!" And then decides "Now sounds like a perfect time to buy an electric car!"
Anyone who had any thoughts at all of buying an electric car purchased it before subsidies expired. Nobody was wavering back and forth while watching a ticking clock, and then made a decision only right after it expired. The only people who are going to be buying in the immediate aftermath are impulse buyers.
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
GM had these problems all the time until they went to three or four unified platforms. Every ititial iteration of a platform has trouble. This is as true for hardware as it is for software in any industry.
He is building 2 new platforms from scratch.
So why are you or any investors surprised?
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It's not much more than Snap or Twitter at this point - losing billions a year, with a lot of investor hope propping up the stock price. Note that all of Tesla's competition (the number one selling electric plug-in vehicle is the Leaf, BTW) are actually making a profit, and are about to turn on the electric car spigot, flooding price-sensitive consumers with plenty of much more economical options than the Model 3.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!