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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.
Factory output will increase with time.... 7.5 years is a bad estimate.
Currently they are ramping up to 2500 per week. They are shipping a whole battery assembly line from Germany to make 5000 per week happen by Q2.
https://www.greencarreports.co...
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Wow...just take their current production rate and forecast it out. What a brilliant forecasting model. However, I'm going to challenge your your model with a one of my own that is equally brilliant.
From the chart in that article, the estimate is that Telsa manufactured about 107 of the Model 3 in September. In October that jumped to 232. November was 686. Dec was 1499, and in January they manufactured 2909 new vehicles.
So on average, that's at least a doubling of production every month (higher actually, but we'll just say double to keep it simple). At that rate, by April they will be manufacturing 23,272 vehicles per month. By July, that will be up to 186,176 per month. By October they should be manufacturing 1,489,408 vehicles per month. And just skipping ahead a bit, by August 2019 they should be manufacturing about 1.5 billion of the Model 3 per month. And that's only 1.5 years out. Calculating out to your estimated 7.5 year time frame, I estimate that by then Tesla will be producing 7,202,335,148,562,342,439,363,104,735,232 units per month.
Do you see anything wrong with either of our projections?
Also spoiler alert. If Detroit could deliver a $35k electric car, they would. They can't. Tesla is not stopping them. Detroit is stopping Detroit.
The Chevy Bolt starts at $37,495 (vs the Model 3's $36,200) and is actually cheaper than the Model 3 for typical option packages. Range is similar. Warranty is similar (better in some ways, worse in others). Please feel free to argue the merits of one vs the other (I personally like Tesla designs, but at least the Bolt doesn't make you navigate a fucking touchscreen display to use the windshield wipers...WTF were their engineers thinking? ), but the point is the Detroit isn't as uncompetitive as you seem to make it sound like they are.
https://electrek.co/2017/12/01/chevy-bolt-ev-us-sales-records/
According to this Chevy sold 20K Bolts from December 2016 to November 2017. MSRP is $37,500, before any rebates
The Ford Focus Electric has an MSRP of $29K, again, before any rebates.
"Oh, you wanted a battery with that?"
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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...
Why would they bother? With demand so high, might as well take care of the top end of the market first. Doubt that you'll see a true $35,000 model 3 till at least 2019. Maybe not even before they launch the model Y
The engineers were probably thinking that the automated rain sensors on the model 3 would take over manual operation of the windshield wipers. Detecting rain on a windshield should be a little easier than automated driving.
You can still use the lever behind the steering wheel to control momentary wipers.
Heaven forbid that a truly innovative car company question the status quo of windshield wiper operation.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
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.
I'll note that I don't say the above criticisms to be harsh to other manfuacturers vehicles in absolute terms, only relative ones. E.g. most reviewers are in agreement that the Bolt is a good (albeit econobox-y) car - speed, handling, etc; it's nothing to be laughed at. But the reviewers also agree that it just doesn't match against a Model 3. If Tesla didn't exist, I think people would be flocking to Bolts, Leafs, etc instead.
Then again, if Tesla didn't exist, I don't think these other manufacturers would have put anywhere near as much investment into making EVs as they have.
Point of interest. Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.
Right. Because in the middle of a battery manufacturing problem, they should totally start making a second type of battery.
The LR battery should be delayed by six months, but the SR battery should suffer no delays whatsoever.
Do you see a problem with this logic here?
Point of interest. Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.
I appreciate your attempt at correcting my projections, but I believe your suggestion that my calculations are off by a month are not themselves correct. I've been paying close attention to the calendar over the last few years and noticed something significant that you didn't seem to take into account. In 2016, we had 366 days in the year. Last year we only had 365. Over the next year, I expect we'll have lost another day, 2 days the year after that, and so on. By the time 7.5 years from now rolls around, we should have fallen behind by an additional 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+(8/2) days. We will have missed out on an entire 32 days, or slightly over a month. Thus, based on the current 365 day length of the year, 7.5 years from now will actually be an entire month later than you might project if you don't take this into account.