10 ms·
This is good news. Musks target of 500,000+ cars a year of velocity in 2018 is an insane goal! By the numbers: - They have just shy of 400,000 of the 3's on
by aresant 10y ago
This is good news.
Musks target of 500,000+ cars a year of velocity in 2018 is an insane goal!
By the numbers:
- They have just shy of 400,000 of the 3's on deposit, along with a backlog of other models.
- Last year Tesla shipped about 76,000 cars.
- Their Q4 delivery numbers were <25,000 cars and trailed expectations by about 5%.
- They blamed last quarter on autopilot hardware issues, eg OEM supplier / component issues.
- They made a significant uptick in velocity between Q2 (14,000 cars) and Q4 (22,200 cars).
I can't imagine how hard Tesla is pushing - for any Tesla HN's good luck! We are rooting for you :)
If, somehow, Musk reverses the chronic lateness and hits 500,000 in 2018 it's going to be quite the fireworks show.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/tesla-falls-as-quarterly-deliveries-trail-analysts-estimates https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/tesla-fal...
- thatswrong0 10y agoI would love a Tesla but man those numbers would be a bit frightening if I were planning on purchasing one soon.. I don't see how they could scale up like that for a brand new model and not have quality problems. Best of luck to them!
- vanattab 10y agoYou hit the nail on the head. It's the scaling/quality control problems that are the biggest risk. Also, from what I understand there have been quite a lot of problems with the different telsa models to date, but the top notch tesla service has been able to keep customers happy. That level of customer service is much easier to provide when selling a few $100,000 cars then when mass producing $30,000 cars.
- chiph 10y agoThe mechanics in /r/justrolledintotheshop complain about parts availability and the constant rolling changes. The door handles on the Model S are apparently up to revision "G".
- ovao 10y agoAssuming Tesla parts start with "A" or no letter suffix, that actually doesn't seem too bad, in my experience. The Ford Focus I owned several years ago had 34 revisions made to the door handle assembly by the time I had to replace mine.
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- sundvor 10y agoYep agree 100% with you there. If anything I'd want a model revision coming a year or two down the track.
- gozur88 10y agoThis. I don't want the first model year of any brand new chassis. Problems inevitably crop up even for companies like Toyota and Daimler.
- fmihaila 10y agoIt's worth noting that the first production cars are to be delivered to the Tesla employees who reserved one. This should have a positive impact on quality, both in terms of motivation ("the car I'm working on is mine"), and by having a shorter debug-fix-test cycle. (I have no idea how many employee reservations there are.)
- Waterluvian 10y agoYou should see the Tesla employee parking lot. Most of the people working on these cars will never afford one.
- spectrum1234 10y ago?? Tesla Model 3 full cost of ownership, esp including tax incentives in CA (where factory is) literally is the cheapest car on the market.
- Waterluvian 10y agoI guess I'm jaded from my week spent there. It was a whole different world to me. One lady talked to me about how this is her second job today and that she can barely make it on time to today's safety training because of the bus schedules. The parking lot was an ocean of beat up cars. The perception I got was that nobody on the production floor would ever own these cars.
- snarf 10y agoI imagine there is a huge difference in the employee pool between their Fremont factory location and their Palo Alto office location. Of course, Tesla is not exactly known to pay even their engineers very well: http://www.autoblog.com/2016/03/08/working-tesla-meaning-stress-relatively-low-pay/ http://www.autoblog.com/2016/03/08/working-tesla-meaning-str...
- J-dawg 10y agoThat just seems really sad. I've read that Tesla doesn't pay exceptionally well, expects people to work really long hours, and doesn't offer an employee discount because Elon doesn't believe in it. Despite all this I've always imagined it to be a great place to work because of the world-changing potential of the work. But the idea of all these people toiling away on an amazing product they can't even hope to own just seems incredibly depressing. I guess it's no different to all the people making iPhones in China, it just hits closer to home.
- chemmail 10y agoThat number is insane, they work with many 3rd party suppliers and any one of those have issues can cause delays for any number of thousand reasons. Tesla also needs to expand their tech support/repair by many folds. Working on cars and computers, any issues is going to take a good amount of time to fix, not even thinking of backlogs. It helps that they literally only have 3 cars, meaning 3 sets of parts to inventory one whatever needs to break, but still the stories of how they handle repair is really amateur.
- Animats 10y agoWhen he first announced that goal, his two top production people quit.[1] Now he has a guy from Audi heading up production. Auto production lines usually produce about a car a minute. 500,000 cars a year is about two production lines running two shifts. In 2005, the NUMMI plant, which is where Tesla is now, produced 400,000 cars with 4,700 employees. Tesla is talking about reaching 9,300 employees. They do more than final assembly there, but still, that's a high headcount for an auto plant. Ford's Kentucky truck plant also produces about 400,000 units a year with about 4,500 employees. [1] http://www.autonews.com/article/20160504/OEM02/160509943/2-top-tesla-manufacturing-execs-to-leave-as-biggest-challenge-looms http://www.autonews.com/article/20160504/OEM02/160509943/2-t...
- Anchor 10y agoTesla does much more in-house when compared to other auto plants, they buy more individual components and raw material and less partially assembled parts. I'm told that many of auto plants that produce the complete vehicle do mainly integration work these days. Tesla's approach is different, so they require more hands, but pay considerably less for the upstream supplies flowing into the plant.
- Theodores 10y agoIn the UK we call this a 'screwdriver operation' where they don't 'really make cars' but they just put a few bits together, pre-assembled elsewhere. This started with the Japanese auto manufacturers wanting to compete in Europe, the UK government gave the incentives to Nissan and Honda but the factories were 'screwdriver operations' according to sceptics.
- cptskippy 10y agoIt's called an assembly plant in the US. There's nothing inherently wrong with this and it can actually afford greater automation and efficiencies in a number of ways. You have the option of receiving prefabricated components from multiple sources. If you're doing built to order manufacturing you can slot in variations more easily of they're complete modules assembled identically.
- dabeeeenster 10y agoAccording to Wikipedia, "As of May 15, 2016, Tesla had taken about 373,000 reservations" so I think the total number of reservations must be well north of 500,000 by now?
- agumonkey 10y agoA bit related, they started production of the 2070(0) battery too.
- rofrol 10y ago2170 - 21 mm by 70 mm dimensions https://qz.com/879121/teslas-tsla-cheaper-more-powerful-2170-battery-cell-is-the-perfect-embodiment-of-its-factory-model/ https://qz.com/879121/teslas-tsla-cheaper-more-powerful-2170...
- agumonkey 10y agoHeh, I thought it was 20x70mm ..
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- amelius 10y ago> Musks target of 500,000+ cars a year of velocity in 2018 is an insane goal! From a computing viewpoint, scaling a car production line is not a theoretically hard problem (it's very parallellizable, but you have to take supply chains into account).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]