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Tesla Temporarily Stops Model 3 Production Line (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Tesla is temporarily stopping production of its Model 3 electric car, amid a long waiting list and several missed targets. The company, however, says the shutdown is intended to resolve some of the problems that have contributed to the numerous delays in getting the cars to hundreds of thousands of reservation holders. The automaker said Monday it would halt production of the Model 3 sedan for 4-5 days at its Fremont, California assembly plant, BuzzFeed reported. Tesla, however, says this is part of a planned period of downtime that was similar to another shutdown in February, and it isn't intended to have an affect on the company's current production targets for the car. "Our Model 3 production plan includes periods of planned downtime in both Fremont and Gigafactory 1," a Tesla spokesperson told The Verge. "These periods are used to improve automation and systematically address bottlenecks in order to increase production rates. This is not unusual and is in fact common in production ramps like this."
Stock pricing I imagine. There's a lot of people with short term investments in the company.
This isn't a "janitorial issue" either. This is about Tesla consistently failing to hit production targets by orders of magnitude, with stock that is prices mostly on assumptions of future performance and hence promises. This shut down actually appears to be the consequence of previous Tesla story of them actually managing to increase production to something close to a quarter or so of what they actually promised to deliver. Which followed the reports that this was done in unsustainable way that would force stoppage of production line in near future due to wear and tear.
Relevance comes from the fact that if even hitting a quarter of production which is needed to just even begin meeting the promises makes the production random inoperable in weeks as appears to have happened here, what is the basis of the stock price of Tesla?
"See, the obsession is that investors have dumped BILLIONS into Tesla and it has been lost - yes, LOST - period."
The money hasn't been lost yet, but Tesla is burning through it's cash at a stunning rate. It looks to be a crapshoot as to whether Tesla will end this year flying high, dead broke, or struggling off into the future having sold off much of whatever it has in the way of marketable assets. See https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/3...
Moody's downgraded Tesla's credit rating to "Negative" a few weeks ago. That's not good.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
The S and X lines were down for one day. For periodic maintenance, because you have to take lines down periodically for maintenance.
S&X are neither production nor demand constrained; they're 18650 cell constrained. Neither Tesla nor Panasonic have an interest in the capital expenditure to increase 18650 production, since Tesla is moving to 2170s.
I will pull over this spaceship right now!