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Tesla Meets Self-Imposed Deadline For Model 3, Rolls Out 7,000 Cars In a Week (cnbc.com)
Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday that the company produced 7,000 cars last week, including 5,000 Model 3 electric sedans. "Beating a self-imposed deadline, the final car rolling off the assembly line on Sunday morning, several hours after the midnight goal set by Musk, two workers at the factory told Reuters on Sunday." CNBC reports: The 5,000th Model 3 finished final quality checks at the Fremont, California factory and was ready to go around 5 a.m. PDT (1200 GMT), one person told Reuters. It was not clear if Tesla could maintain that level of production for a longer period of time. Tesla had a goal of producing 5,000 Model 3s per week before the close of the second quarter on Saturday to demonstrate it could mass produce the battery-powered sedan.
I doubt the Q2 report will show the information everyone wants, which is the production trend over time. If you only look at the quarter average, they won't be making anywhere near 5000 a week, especially given they've had several shutdowns to retool. But it's still possible they ramped up significantly in the final weeks and has a trend line towards 500k for the entire year.
As for their financial situation, I predict they'll still be in the red after accounting for SG&A, though maybe not as bad as last quarter due to the layoffs a few weeks ago. Interest payments will be an even bigger burden and R&D will not have changed much. Finally for capex, it might be a good thing that they didn't get the building permit they wanted and settled for a tent instead.
Their main problem will still be cash flow, since they're not making enough to cover their expenses. If the "pay another $2500 to order now" thing doesn't pan out, they'll need even more high-interest loans, or worst case, another round of stock offerings.
All of them.
You can't run a line 24/7/365. There's routine maintenance, cleaning and various other reasons that production equipment needs to shut down for a period of time.
Meanwhile, in the real world, despite shorts insisting that last quarter's weekly numbers (2k) would be an unsustainable burst rate, they maintained it for weeks, all the way up to the next scheduled downtime. Then they got back up to 3,5k and maintained that until the next set of upgrades. Now they're at 5k. But if you really think the 5k is a burst, by all means short that.
Why must all aquatic villains play the organ?
he does consistently meet his targets
he is just consistently to optimistic in his predictions of when he'll meet those targets
If the production shift started Saturday before midnight, then, that shift's production counts towards that week. That is fairly standard practice.
Read what Elon actually said. 5000 Model 3s were 'factory gated', not produced. That means, according to Elon himself, a chunk of that number were already built at the beginning of the last week of June. Knowing this week was coming up, that chunk could be a significant portion. They are counted in the final tally even though in the last week Tesla may have done as little as move them from one lot to another. So Tesla didn't even pull off a true 5K burst week. This is why sustained production numbers are the only accurate ones. Those numbers are what Moody's pays attention to.
"If you only look at the quarter average, they won't be making anywhere near 5000 a week, especially given they've had several shutdowns to retool"
They produced 28,578 Model 3s in Q2 vs 9766 in Q1 2018 so the avg weekly production went from 751 to 2198, an improvement of 342%
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