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Bloomberg Starts Tracking Tesla Model 3 Production (bloomberg.com)
WindBourne writes: Tesla is producing their Model 3, but is apparently tired of answering critics about production. So, they quit telling. Now, Bloomberg has an active tracker that shows the total production and deliveries, along with the production per week, which is probably more important. In fact, they are now up to 1,025 Model 3s per week, and it is apparent that Tesla is growing by leaps and bounds on this as parts of the manufacturing line are converted to full robotics. Bloomberg reportedly tracks Tesla's production via Vehicle Identification Numbers (VINs), which are unique strings of digits displayed on every new car sold in the U.S., along with "data from official U.S. government resources, social media reports, and direct communication with Tesla owners." While the company is now building approximately 1,025 Model 3 vehicles a week, Bloomberg estimates that Tesla has manufactured a total of 7,438 Model 3s so far.
Bolt has a lot of potential but GM seems to be content to only produce ~25,000 per year. Kinda looks like Musk was right, that they can't sell it for the price without CARB credits or they'd lose money. Over in Europe GM may have been losing as much as $12 000 per bolt. https://insideevs.com/gm-repor...
And once it's working they plan to duplicate the whole line for 10k, finishing by the end of Q4. They're currently at 10% of the production design spec.
Just to explain better (because I expect a lot of bad information on this thread): the bottleneck is battery packs. Not battery cells, but the assembly of the packs themselves. Tesla contracted the construction of two of the four zones of the pack assembly process out to an engineering firm, and discovered that not only did they not work, but it wasn't even possible to make them work; they were fundamentally broken.
Tesla purchased a German engineering firm last year, Grohmann, which is now Tesla-Grohmann. When the broken line was discovered, Tesla dispatched Grohmann to rush together a replacement, and apparently they pulled it off. But the line is still in Germany. They'll be moving it to the US and installing it over the next several months. Apparently the new line is much faster and more efficient than the old design specs, too (Grohmann has been quickly becoming Tesla's "Skunk Works")
In the meantime, Tesla has implemented and is expanding a semi-manual stopgap. Robots do all of the welding, cell connections, etc, but they have to use people to move the parts from one stage to the next, and in some cases place parts for the robots. They're dealing with the slowdown by parallelizing the process.
Musk has owned up to hubris on this one. Tesla's attitude had been, "Meh, we know battery packs"; they put most of their effort on systems that were new, and not nearly enough holding contractors to the fire and making sure well enough in advance that their hardware could actually deliver. It's come back to bite them hard. Musk has talked about how much this has been "lesson learned", and how they're planning a lot of new steps on the Y to make sure that it's not delayed as well. Well, I'll believe it when I see it. No matter how ambitious the project, Musk almost always delivers - but he almost always delivers late. It would be out of character to do otherwise. ;)
Model 3 reservation counts have been holding steady through the delays, and actually started growing again now that Tesla has started providing Model 3s to showrooms. That said, this was before they announced the delay on the SR version (which should be expected given the LR delays, but...); that might have a negative impact. But probably not a profound one. Tesla is fortunate that the competition is... well, absent (at least from the perspective of most reservation holders); most see the only real competition to the 3 to be other Tesla models. CCS/CHAdeMO networks are a joke compared to the Supercharger network (~43kW real-world on most vs. ~117kW, much lower reliability, less even spacing, far fewer chargers per station, usually much higher prices, etc). Teslas are faster, better handling, longer range, have more interesting options (AWD, air suspension, performance package, etc), over-the-air updates, don't look like econoboxes, have properly climate-managed battery packs with low degradation, have far lower depreciation than competitors, etc and are built by a company they know will never abandon EVs. So while you may get some grumbling, few people are giving up their spot in line.
You of course hear other manufacturers shouting "But wait, we'll have the coolest thing since sliced bread soon!", but they've been saying that for the past decade, and continually delivered lacklustre offerings in comparison to Tesla, to the point that Model S and X frequently outsell vehicles a third to a quarter of their price (a market 1 1/2 orders of magnitude smaller)
Point of interest. Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.