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Tesla Is Making Over 2,000 Model 3s a Week, Falling Just Short of Its Goal (theverge.com)
According to an email from Elon Musk, Tesla has increased its production of its mass-market electric Model 3 to over 2,000 units per week. "It's an impressive ramp up of production, but it still falls short of Musk's goal of 2,500 Model 3s per week by the end of the first quarter of 2018," reports The Verge. From the report: In the companywide email (which was obtained by Jalopnik, Electrek, and Autonocast host Ed Niedermeyer), Musk sounds a celebratory note on the 2,000-vehicle per week benchmark, while ignoring the larger issue of missed deadlines: "It has been extremely difficult to pass the 2,000 cars per week rate for Model 3, but we are finally there. If things go as planned today, we will comfortably exceed that number over a seven-day period! Moreover, the whole Tesla production system is now on a firm foundation for that output, which means we should be able to exceed a combined Model S, X, and 3 production rate of 4,000 vehicles per week and climbing rapidly. This is already double the pace of 2017! By the end of this year, I believe we will be producing vehicles at least four times faster than last year." With Q1 now behind us, we can expect to see Tesla report its official production numbers to investors sometime this week.
https://www.bloomberg.com/grap...
However, their methods are inexact. They are doing the best they can without access to inside knowledge. Musk has inside knowledge, and there are laws against lying to the stock market.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
S and X production were only down for one day. Lines have to go down periodically regardless; tooling does not last forever, even if you're not doing upgrades.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
their employees to work extra hard, I am surprised he missed at all. I was expecting him to fudge it up to 2400 or 2500 for the week ending Q1 by doing whatever (stop X/S production and reassign bodies, hold cars from the prior week, ...) and then go back to the 1200/wk. Technically he is not lying then. But we will see as Q2 moves along. Bloomberg is likely going to keep tallying up deliveries. It will be interesting what happens tomorrow on share price.
Welcome to Bear World, where pointing out facts is "spin".
The only reporting that described people from the S and X lines working on the 3 line described it as a 1-day downtime.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Meanwhile, Tesla produced its first 10k Model 3s in the time it took GM to produce its first 1000 Bolts. I guess that's that "decades to tune their processes and supply chains" they had going for them, eh? And it costs Tesla $10k less per vehicle.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Meanwhile, in the real world, Tesla declined 5,13%, only 3,23% worse than the Dow (which also declined today).
The "story" was an email sent to employees. Not to the media. Now you may argue that it was sent to employees with the expectation that some of them would leak it to the media. But please get your facts right.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
What "moving the goalposts"? Even with their delays, they brought a new EV to market in higher volumes faster than GM. So where's your "the big automakers are going to teach upstart Tesla a lesson" coming from? If they're so good at making EVs, well, why don't they? Why is it that Tesla, even with half a year of delays, can tool a brand new line and churn out EVs faster than them?
Exact same line we've been hearing for the past ten years. Meanwhile, Tesla sells more nearly-six-figure-average vehicles in the US than its closest EV competitors sell econoboxes to a vastly larger customer base and half a million people are waiting on the Model 3, a vehicle designed to - like the S and X - turn a profit 25% margin.
Did you ever stop and think that maybe, just maybe, the ability to make a good, affordable EV doesn't just get magicked into existence because you're a "big automaker", that you actually have to invest billions of dollars a year in research and infrastructure to make it happen? Did you ever stop and think that the reason that the big automakers haven't pushed harder on EVs is because they don't want to, because they're all tooled up and researched to build ICEs?
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Toolings typically last for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of operations. Tesla should still be on its first toolings UNLESS they've redesigned parts, forcing tooling changes or new tools altogether.
Yes, the tool lasts that long. Of course it never needs to be sharpened, or never chips, or rebuilt, or damaged, or, or, or, or, or
As someone who has worked in a factory, it is normal to change tools very regularly, so as to not make bad parts that need rework or scrapping.
Do you actually think a drill or a tap can just run forever?
And those are quite good compared to an endmill, to say nothing of a facemill.
I'm not sure what sort of tooling is required for building a Tesla, but even a drill needs to be changed, and I'd be surprised if at least something wasn't tapped.
Reminder: at the end of Q4, it was ~250/wk average in December, a ~450/wk average in January, and an "extrapolated" 1000/wk rate from the last few days of the quarter. This is significant growth regardless.
Meanwhile, the Grohmann line (replacing the downed zones #1 and #2 on the battery line) was shipped to Tesla last month and should be going live over the course of the next couple months.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Would this be a crash program?
Have gnu, will travel.
So you're saying that Tesla has been lying to the SEC for years? The average margin on S and X was 25%. Their overall automotive margin is down to 18% now because of the problems with the 3 dragging down their average, but that's to be expected; you can't have a line designed for 5000/wk running at a fraction of that and still expect to get your design profit margin.
From your link:
Four. Years. The line downtime was 8-10 weeks, but it took four years to tool up.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
NASDAQ was down 2.7% and if you look at tech only it was worse than that. Amazon was down 5.2%. Today was primarily a tech bashing day because they are catching the brunt of the eye of the orange one this week - so desperately need to be able to put an eye of sauron image in here :(.
I bought some Tesla today and hope to buy more at an even lower level tomorrow. I'll sell half when it hits 300 again sometime in the next month (it's not good to be too greedy) and hold the rest in hopes of the normal 345 peak.
*Swoon*! Oh you spoony bard - I am vanquished.
I shall retreat for the evening and drown my sorrows with Teslaquilla.
(Rei has left the party)
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Can we stop having versions go, 3, 3s, 4, 4s, etc. I don't get the "s", or why cannot just go 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.
The reason the model names are 'S', '3', and 'X' is so that when you've bought the whole set, it (sort of) spells out 'SEX'. Yes, really. (They originally wanted the Model 3 to be named the Model E, but Ford has the rights to the name 'Model E')
And if/when the model Y comes out, you'll be able to spell out SEXY, so there's that.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Having worked a lot with installing factory automation, I can actually parse what is stated in that article. The four years were not spent planning, but actually building the replacement factory content.
That is how installing factory assembly lines work. They are built offsite, one sub-assembly line at the time, complete with SAT acceptance, and then moved to the factory and installed and tested there.
That is what the article explains. They spent four years speccing and building sub-assembly lines, and then budgeted 8 weeks to remove the old assembly line and get the new ones running. Which is a crazy schedule, which they almost managed to keep - which is amazing.
But no, they did not shift over production in 8-10 weeks total implementation time. The new factory already existed at the start of those 8 weeks, only spread out at the integrator sites.
That is a really silly calculation. If the Dow went down by 0.01% and on the same day TSLA went down by 1%, that would be 9900% worse, but it doesn't tell you anything useful. It makes even less sense if TSLA went up by 1% on that day, now your 'difference' would be -9900% or -10100% (I can't even decide which one makes more sense.) Using a number (Dow) that is the sum of lots of positives and negatives as a denominator is silly. TSLA underperformed the Dow by 3.2% is the correct way of looking at this.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Nobody sane goes to China with new tech. They will be happy to cooperate with you. One year later, an almost identical car from an almost identical factory in a different city will hit the market. That factory will be owned by your cooperation partner. But unlike your joint factory, only by them. In fact, they'll not even tell you that the other factory exists, despite if you were put in either one without being told which one it is, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
Tall story? Happened to Mercedes Benz.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Then you've never actually built anything, have you? Most injection molds made from from hardened steel will flow hundreds of thousands to millions of shots. It's quite common in consumer electronics to do that; for example, when i worked at SONOS they used to regularly get 2.5MM shots from a plastic tool before redoing it. Steel stamps can last just as long, for one product I do I regularly get 750K stamps out of a forge tool, pressing 12mm thick 1008 steel plate (disc shape, 83mm ID/175mm OD). Of course, when you're making 400-500K units a month, you need that kind of longevity; most big-volume manufacturing doesn't have the luxury of only doing 2K units per week...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Sharpening, rebuilding, cleaning a tool is a few day job at most; cutting a new tool is typically 40-50 days (or longer, if it's a large sheet metal press process). Tools will last quite a long time, and if your tooling lifetime is impacting your ability to make product - then you're either using the wrong process, have a crappy tool engineer - or both. And yes, products I've personally designed ship in the 500K+ per month range individually (collectively, somewhere around 4MM per month).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Not really, Rei just doesn;t put up with cr*p from anti-tesla trolls and tries to educate you at the same time.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I saw that on the news. IIRC the knock-off factory isn't even in another city like GP said - it's just round the corner.
Pretty convenient. If they run out of parts they can just get their mole to chuck some over the fence.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm not sure what sort of tooling is required for building a Tesla, but even a drill needs to be changed, and I'd be surprised if at least something wasn't tapped.
The tooling in question here isn't generally disposables like drills and taps but robots, paint, jigs, welding automation, material handling, presses, (big) die sets, etc. They aren't drilling and tapping anything on the main assembly line. All that stuff is done long before the parts reach the line. The tools in question are the ones on the line that can really affect production rates.
Skipping proto tooling would be a big gamble for a well-established company; for a start-up, that's suicide and IMHO just further confirms the team at Tesla really doesn't have much experience in manufacturing.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
My Mazda 3 costs half as much so no Tesla for me
And the Chevy Spark costs half of the Mazda 3. So what?
Meanwhile, Tesla produced its first 10k Model 3s in the time it took GM to produce its first 1000 Bolts
That doesn't really tell you some very important information. What good is it to produce something fast if the quality stinks? I'm not saying Tesla's quality is good or bad but as the saying goes you can have it good, fast, or cheap. Pick two. Furthermore, it is pointless to run a production line faster than demand for the product. Tesla has a huge backlog of orders for the Model 3. The Bolt? Not so much even though it is a respectably good vehicle. I think the production line in Lake Orion has a capacity of something like 25-50K vehicles per year which is probably reasonable given expected sales.
And in all seriousness, do you REALLY doubt that GM's ability to ramp up production in a big hurry if they decide to do so?
Incidentally I'm distantly involved in the supply chain for the Bolt and I can see why GM is losing their ass on the Bolt based on the meeting I've had to sit through. The part I was involved in was a inexpensive piece and we had innumerably meetings with 10-15 people in attendance which had to have cost FAR more than the sales value of the part could ever amount to. Unbelievably inefficient.
Read.
Gross margin = Gross profits / sales = historically around 25%, down a bit recently due to Model 3 production issues Your graph is operating margin, which is EBIT/sales. EBIT = gross profits - operating expenses (SGA, etc) - non-operating income + interest. In 2017, gross profit for TSLA was $2,2B, SGA was $2,5B, and R&D was $1,4B, yielding a net loss of $1,6B (plus everything else = -$2B). But a gross margin around 25% is quite solid for the auto industry. Tesla ran a negative not because of negative automotive margins, but because 1) SGA is scaled up to the size Tesla is actively growing to, not to the company's current sales, and 2) likewise for the R&D budget. Which are both exactly what you want to see in a rapidly growing company. None of Tesla's investors want to see them sit back on their laurels right now and live off of S and X; the point of investing in Tesla is to have a stake in a company that's transforming the automotive market. And that requires rapid scaleup. Gross margins prove the economic case for your products; operating margins remain negative until you've grown large.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."