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."

Comments

Next - janitorial staffing updates

[sinij]

Why such obsession over trivial and routine manufacturing decisions at Tesla? Are we also going to get "Janitors at Tesla factory had to put overtime to unclog plugged toilet" headlines?

Re:Next - janitorial staffing updates

[ausekilis]

Because people are genuinely interested in the amount of fiber in Mr. Musk's diet.

Re:Next - janitorial staffing updates

[Luckyo]

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?

Re:Next - janitorial staffing updates

[Octorian]

Why such obsession over trivial and routine manufacturing decisions at Tesla? Are we also going to get "Janitors at Tesla factory had to put overtime to unclog plugged toilet" headlines?

Because Tesla is a heavily shorted stock, and has started to return to the "good news" phase of the cycle.
Whenever a stock is heavily shorted, good news that increases the stock value must be immediately followed by a series of damning articles to make the stock value drop again.

So if Model 3 production was completely on-track, and there was nothing else bad to report about the company, you absolutely would see a front-page article on the terrible toilet problems that were causing issues at the factory. (Often, but not exclusively, originating from a place like "Business Insider" or "Seeking Alpha" from an author who quietly admits to have a short position on TSLA and a long position on competitors.)

Re: Next - janitorial staffing updates

[haruchai]

I was about to respond, snippily, that it's not like there's a whole lot of people cancelling, and then thought I'd google.

Turns out AC's right -- people are cancelling, and in many cases Tesla's taking a really really long time to refund their money (up to 3 months, it seems). More at https://www.wired.com/story/ca...

Not technically "not refunding", but still pretty poor.

Did you read your own link?
"The next day, I found a FedEx envelope on my doorstep. My refund had arrived — 61 business days after I cancelled my reservation.

Not every Tesla refund takes this long — or this much work. "It was easy," says Jeff Maggard, a former reservation holder from Ithaca, New York, who cancelled his deposit in February after a career change made it hard to justify buying a new car. His refund showed up on his credit card less than two weeks later. "I did it all online without talking to anyone. There was no number to call so I could be talked out of it by a representative. No dumb tricks to make me stay. It was great," Maggard says. "Very customer-centered."

I've waited much longer for refunds for a lot less than $1000 so I don't know what the gripe is all about.
In any case, it's clear that it's not everyone who had to wait a long time.
It's been suggested that a lot of the complainants may have had the credit cards used to place the reservation expire which would make a refund difficult.

Re:Next - janitorial staffing updates

[haruchai]

"Maybe because Tesla and Musk constantly demand attention. Heck, Musk installs a few solar panels at one bldg. in Puerto Rico and its an international story. But that's ALL HE DID in PR. Its not like installing solar panels is some great achievement, its been done for decades. Meanwhile, individuals and organizations that did so much more were and are still ignored"

yeah, Tesla Energy only installed at least 6 projects to restore power in Puerto Rico incl at a children's hospital.
Stupid of Elon to go through all that trouble when all he had to do was toss a few bundles of paper towels, say that everyone was enjoying themselves and we can't do more because of all the bigly ocean water surrounding the island.

Re: Next - janitorial staffing updates

[Rei]

Indeed. They're half a year late. Reservations have remained roughly constant at about half a million. And over on the Tesla forums, people are cheering the news about scheduled line downtime. Because you take lines down to upgrade them to be better / faster. Every time Tesla has taken the line down in the past, it's come back up much faster than previously. The last line downtime saw an over 2x increase in production.

I've been hoping to see news that Tesla would be taking the line down, as that would be the next sign of an upcoming production jump, and was very happy when I saw this today.

Re:Next - janitorial staffing updates

[Rei]

This is about Tesla consistently failing to hit production targets by orders of magnitude,

They hit 80% of last quarter's target. Is that "off by an order of magnitude" to you?

Which followed the reports that this was done in unsustainable

What BS "reports"? They've maintained the 2k/wk rate since then.

Yes, they're six months late. Big whoop. Reservations are still at half a million, the "competition" is still a joke, and each of the supposed "Tesla killers" so far has turned out to be half-baked. Exceeding in some cases even my pessimism. I totally didn't call that, for example, the 2018 Leaf would only be able to go 200-300km before being throttled to 20-25kW charge rates. I mean, ouch.

Re:Next - janitorial staffing updates

[Rei]

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.

Short sellers

[Okian Warrior]

Tesla is the most shorted company right now.

The problem with the situation is that most investors *want* Tesla to fail so that they can make money from the short sales.

OTOH, Elon Musk is aware of the shorts and tends to do something to prop up the stock price whenever it drops a little. Like announcing a new model or a new production goal. (The production goals are never met, but the announcements make the stock tick up a couple of percent.)

So right now we're awash in bear market opinions, and many suggestive (but worthless) statements keep making the rounds such as:

"Tesla has never made a profit"
"Tesla loses money on every car they sell"
"Tesla only survives due to government handouts"
"Tesla is so far behind that some people will get their cars $SOMENUMBER years from now"
"Tesla is burning through cash, will be bankrupt in $NUM months"
"Musk is a serial liar"

Those are the highlights - have I missed any?

To analyze #4 as an example ("burning through cash"), note that this is something the CFO and CEO keep track of and anticipate, and are responsible for raising more cash before the bankruptcy actually happens. Also, specifically Tesla predicts that they won't need another round of financing, but that option is certainly open if they need it.

It's nigh impossible to get an accurate assessment of Tesla's worth right now, due to corruption in reporting.

Tesla expects to turn a profit for the first time later this year. Their stock will probably skyrocket when that happens.

Re:It's not trivial

[Rei]

Experienced automakers wouldn't be going through that.

Meanwhile, even with the delays, Tesla made their first 10000 Model 3s in less time than it took GM to make their first 1000 Bolts, from the start of tooling. And the first Model 3s were rolling off the line well sooner than the first Bolts (again, relative to the start of tooling).

Also, Tesla is going to have a huge cash shortfall

Bankwupt! Bankwupt, I say! ;)

Hey, let's put or skeptic's hat on. Let's say that Musk is wrong about 5-6k/wk at the end of this quarter. Let's say they only do 4k at the end of this quarter. That would still be 80% of the line's initial design spec, aka the point where it's designed to be turning a 25% gross margin. Even a miss this quarter still means that they've pretty much succeeded with line development. Yes, they'll tune it over Q3 to get the rate up as high as they can, and this might mean a couple weeks downtime here and there. Sure, they'll probably take a quarter or two to realize the full margin. But at the end of this quarter, they're probably going to be earning at least 10% margin on at least 4k cars per week with an average sale price in the early run of around $45k (it's worth pointing out that the early cars are option-heavy and likely to have higher margins, so 10% is very pessimistic). That's Model 3 profits of $234M in Q3 (positive-$234M, vs a Model 3 loss in the last quarterly report) if Q3 averages only 4k/wk across all of Q3 (vs. the target of 5k/6k per week at the start of Q3). If Q3 averages 5/wk and 15% margin? That's $438M. Q4, at say 6k and 20%? $702M. I mention these numbers to contrast with the 598M quarterly loss they had in Q4.

Even if we ignore everything else - how the solar gigafactory is finally starting consumer sales, the huge boom in energy orders, the half billion or so they're going to get from deposits on the Y, etc, etc - Tesla's cash burn is all but over in Q3, and they're profitable in Q4. And even in Q2, their burn is heavily slashed from Q4/Q1.

And this is just the start of reasons I could go into as to why this "bankwupcy" thing is nonsense; there's about a dozen more. The shorts, strangely enough, always only develop their hindsight in the rearview mirror. To them, Tesla is always bankrupt in six months. Last summer, Tesla was going bankrupt this winter. Last fall, they were going bankrupt this spring. This winter, the bankruptcy was scheduled for summer. Here we are in the fall sweeps. Well, sorry to rain on the parade, but their predictive ability is worth squat. They keep pointing to reasons that Tesla did better than they expected, and it's always, "Well, of course they could do that, but they can't do it again, so now they're doomed!". Yeah? Well where were you pointing out what they could do? They were just off screaming "Bankrupt!" to their Seeking Alpha echo chamber, only developing their "foresight" after the fact. It's like listening to the Nostradamus crowd insisting that he predicted the 11 September attacks - if the predictions were so great, where were you on 10 September?

Re:It's not trivial

[vtcodger]

"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.