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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.
... and his crew succeed a million times over and become filthy rich while doing it. The penance with which Musk pursues his visions is inspiring and he serves as a very neat role model.
Two thumbs up for scaring the living sh*t out of the leading German car industry which, IMHO, has become way to complacent with its success.
And thanks for paving the way into carbon neutral traffic and land-transport.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Makes me think of that 80's movie Gung Ho where they rushed production to keep from being closed and cars were rolling off the line missing tires...
Plus with Tesla's penchant to make production changes on the fly, and the questionable build quality of the Model 3's they've already produced.. yeah, pass.
In this case, yes. Shorters (or anyone for that matter) who spread lies and misinformation to game the market deserve all the shit they get when it goes badly
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The layoffs will be a benefit in Q3. They're a hit in Q2 due to severance.
Correct that the Q2 delivery numbers will be low. Which is actually a very important thing, to keep the tax credit from expiring in Q2. That credit is potentially worth half a billion dollars to Tesla's customers, and some proportion will be used in buying more options. Options are high margin - sometimes almost pure profit. You want it to expire at the start of a quarter, not the end of one. Not like any manufacturer would ever admit to trying to "time" it.
500k Model 3 per year will still require significant expansion; current production is 250k Model 3 per year (+100k S+X). However, they've clearly found a way to expand cheaply. Tesla's last announced plan was to hit 6k in Q3. Doesn't sound particularly difficult given how much they scaled up in Q2.
Nobody, not Tesla or any serious analyst, expects them to be positive in Q2. But more and more analysts appear to be agreeing with Tesla's forecast (widely panned by analysts a couple months ago) of being sustainably profitable later this year. Tesla believes it'll be Q3.
There's no need for more cash, so the topic of loans or stock offerings is right out.
As a reminder to anyone reading this who disagrees with anything written above: you have a tool to financially profit off your disagreement with me - short selling. Unless you don't like earning money or something... or unless you don't actually believe what you preach. I mean, even if you had to put it on your credit card, how could you turn down such a rate of return?
Why must all aquatic villains play the organ?
Corporate goals/deadlines are generally always 'self imposed'. Seems folks think Tesla deserves some type of credit for this?
Not where there are big interest payments coming due in the near future.
It is the mark of a well run company to be able to accurately predict performance and then to hit those goals on schedule.
That's one way to measure it but the most important measure is their ability to consistently develop and maintain substantial free cash flow. Nobody really cares if a company meets artificial expectations if they consistently generate substantial profits. Companies generally can only "predict" performance accurately by fudging the numbers anyway. If you see a company that consistently "beats" wall street expectations by just a little every quarter, you can be dead certain there is some financial engineering going on. (I'm an accountant so I should know) In reality businesses are rarely so predictable so some amount of variation should be expected. You just don't want any huge negative surprises but a little up and down is generally fine unless you are some wall street asshat who only cares about the current quarter.
Musk isn't very good at defining targets that can be hit on schedule and/or hitting them on schedule. That doesn't mean he will fail, but it is generally a bad sign.
For most companies I would regard this as a negative but it's no secret that Musk sets very hard to achieve "deadlines" all the time so I think that is baked into the stock price. In a way it's kind of genius in that he acts a little irrational so it makes it harder for analysts to hold him to a standard of performance. He's also taking a page from the Amazon playbook in not really giving a shit about short term results and apologetically so.
In Soviet Russia, people always avoided things build near the end of their production drives. To meet the yearly production quota, they typically build things as slipshod as possible in the last quarter.