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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.
At the thought of all those day traders with HUGE shorts against Tesla realizing that they're going to get absolutely frickin' REAMED.
... 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
All of them.
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?
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?
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.