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> The Model 3 output increased exponentially, representing a fourfold increase over last quarter. This is the fastest growth of any automotive company in the mo

> The Model 3 output increased exponentially, representing a fourfold increase over last quarter. This is the fastest growth of any automotive company in the modern era. If this rate of growth continues, it will exceed even that of Ford and the Model T. Way to spin all the production issues and delay of the previous quarter into a positive. They're way behind the goals they set for themselves, but instead of measuring by those goals, they measure themselves by their weakest performance, and suddenly their performance becomes historic.

lallysingh 9y ago
Musk is a good salesman.
- kbody 9y ago
  Musk is a genius, but still not everything that a company does is done by the CEO.
  - InitialLastName 9y ago
    > Musk is a genius, Apparently, Musk is a good salesman, especially of himself.
    - pm90 9y ago
      Come on, he can be a salesman and a genius. At least he is a very extreme determined and hard working person, if not an actual "genius" (whose brains are wired differently). People don't generally make a mid career change into rocket science and then have the most successful private rocket launch company.
      - InitialLastName 9y ago
        > People don't generally make a mid career change into rocket science and then have the most successful private rocket launch company ... except for the other successful entrepreneurs who made mid-career changes to fund private rocket launch companies: - Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) - Robert Bigelow (Bigelow Aerospace) - Jim Benson (SpaceDev) - Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic) I'll grant that Musk appears to be a successful businessman, and an effective leader, but his real strength appears to be selling his ideas so hard that even his most Boring (tm) projects get covered in giant piles of hype.
        jacquesm 9y ago
        You forgot Carmack and Armadillo Aerospace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace
      - ubernostrum 9y ago
        Musk's standard operating procedure is to 1. Find a market where most or all of the fundamental R&D has already been done and paid for by someone else, and is publicly available to use 2. Enter that market, evolve/iterate the state of the art a bit 3. Promise immense economies of scale, and slather everything with glittery marketing and PR stunts This is what SpaceX is doing. This is what Tesla is doing. It is not a sign of "genius", and in both cases the promises Musk is making are... ambitious. There have been multiple attempts to bring down the cost of launching stuff into space, and with the smartest people in the world working on the problem we've seen only modest gains. Musk barged into the market and promised at least an order-of-magnitude reduction. So far that has not, to my knowledge, materialized, and I know of nothing in the pipeline which would magically cause it to do so (and economies of scale with things as expensive as space launches are uncharted waters). And with Tesla, Musk seems to have overpromised on production. But, amusingly, building a factory that cranks out cars -- even slightly-exotic cars! -- is kind of a well-understood problem. I strongly suspect the thing holding Tesla back is Musk's Silicon Valley "not invented here" mindset leading him to disdain the accumulated knowledge of the existing industry. Which is not a "genius" move, by the way.
adventured 9y ago
Their critics are very loudly proclaiming Tesla is an immense failure, that the Model 3 is a failure, and that they're going bankrupt in a matter of months. The FUD being broadly directed at Tesla is astounding and reeks of bias of one sort or another. The other major automakers are running years behind where Tesla is at today. That's where the embarrassment should be today: those automakers are still gleefully selling tens of millions of fossil-fuel-only vehicles. Producing 20,000 Model 3 vehicles per quarter this year will be an accomplishment (even in spite of Musk's absurd prior goal). It implies they can push well over 100,000 units in 2019. These days they're being given little credit for what they are accomplishing. When they hit that 20,000 quarterly marker, the Model 3 becomes one of the best selling mid-priced luxury vehicles on the planet in its first year.
- elvirs 9y ago
  they are given a ton of credit. their stock value was a good proof of how much credit they were given but you can't keep being late and not delivering on promises to hundreds of thousands of customers who made deposits while the CEO is busy building flamethrowers amd hats to sell them on twitter
  - pavs 9y ago
    In case there is any confusion, Musk is not actually building flamethrowers and hats in person. His time is as wasted as saying "yes" to this ideas. Which is to say that not much at all.
    - cheerioty 9y ago
      I'm pretty sure those are his ideas ;)
- danso 9y ago
  How are the other makers "years behind" Tesla? The Model S is the best-selling EV but not by an order of magnitude. GM was pretty close last year in sales and I don't think it's a bad bet to bet that GM will beat Tesla in getting self-driving tech (GM Cruise is only second to Waymo in testing self-driving, at least in California). https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/30/the-5-best-selling-electric-cars-of-2017.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/30/the-5-best-selling... https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-self-driving-car-disengagement-2017 https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-s... Tesla deserves credit for getting other automakers to take the EV market seriously, but they are by no means years behind Tesla in terms of production and sales.
mgiannopoulos 9y ago
Why shouldn’t they be judged according to the performance of their competitors? If you aim high but your “failure” is better than the rest, it’s still something positive.
- twtw 9y ago
  The Model T is not a competitor.
empath75 9y ago
> If this rate of growth continues, it will exceed even that of Ford and the Model T. https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
gwbas1c 9y ago
I never expected Tesla to deliver the Model 3 on time. I just "delayed" my order to AWD because my Leaf lease is up before I'll get the 2WD Tesla. (Also, because my wife wants a minivan and Chrysler now offers a plugin minivan.) Remember, no car in history ever had 500,000 pre-orders. No car even came close. If anyone expected Tesla to ramp up to that kind of production overnight, they are delusional. Besides, when I ordered my model 3, I assumed that it would be very late... So late, that I assumed I'd just wait for the AWD one to replace our AWD car.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  >Remember, no car in history ever had 500,000 pre-orders. No car even came close. If anyone expected Tesla to ramp up to that kind of production overnight, they are delusional. At the same time this is an admission that Musk is/was selling a delusion to people when Tesla set it's production goals.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Optimism isn’t delusional. They’re already making ~192k vehicles a year at their current 3/S/X production rate (which will only increase). You would have to be malicious or ignorant to think that can’t be scaled up to NUMMIs previous 350k/year run rate in the next 3-12 months. Disclosure: TSLA shareholder
    - danso 9y ago
      2017 was its best year, and it produced ~101,000 vehicles: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/3/16846860/tesla-2017-deliveries-model-3-production https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/3/16846860/tesla-2017-delive...
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - Robotbeat 9y ago
        I believe he was referring to the NUMMI factory pre-Tesla, which produced about 6000 cars and trucks per week at its peak. It does seem like Tesla will soon (3-12 months) eclipse that record.
mariusmg 9y ago
>they measure themselves by their weakest performance, and suddenly their performance becomes historic. Yeah, is called PR. Shitty, but everyone does it.
ucaetano 9y ago
Yeah, and you need more than 2 data points to claim it is exponentially. This is bullshitty PR. TO: 10 vehicles T1: 40 vehicles Is production growing 4x per T, or 30 vehicles per T?
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  But there WERE more than two points; surely you know that. Q4 was not the first quarter that Model 3s were produced. Q3 of 2017 is. So that's three points. To use your example: T-1: 2 vehicles T0: 10 vehicles T1: 40 vehicles That is exponential. If it was only a linear ramp-up, that'd imply negative 20 Model 3s were produced in Quarter 3 of 2017. You might think this is being pedantic, or that "exponential" is just a buzzword, but it's not: the point about exponential ramp-up is that if you're off by a factor of, say, 4x in production, that may mean you're only behind a few months. A relatively small time change corresponds to a very large difference in production. Exponentials don't last forever; eventually a plateau is reached. But as you're bringing automation/production up, you're still in the exponential phase (as the data shows), and so small delays can make a big difference in production without telling you much about how many you'll produce once production is fully up and running.
thisisit 9y ago
> Way to spin all the production issues and delay of the previous quarter into a positive. I don't really like Musk but sending positive messages in Investment relations is the key to keeping the company afloat. At one of my previous employers we lost top 4 customers and 10% of our revenue. But, the investment relationship site said - "We are up 1% in revenue, if we discount top 4 customers". If Tesla admits and says - "We have improved but we are still behind on our original promise" then the stock price is going to drop like a rock.
- misja111 9y ago
  No, investors are not that stupid. They might buy these marketing talks for a while but eventually they will see through. The recent drop in Tesla's share price is a testament of that. "You can fool some people all of the time, and you can fool all people some of the time, but you can't fool all people all of the time."
  - bald 9y ago
    Price is a function of supply and demand. So this tactic is better than the blunt tactic even if it manages to fool only one shareholder.
    - chillingeffect 9y ago
      Yes, it's about the ratio of shareholders you can fool all the time to the ratio of the shareholders you can't fool all the time.
  - thisisit 9y ago
    I agree investors are not stupid. But, I never said it was about investors being stupid. It is simply not saying stuff which casts doubt about Tesla's ability to deliver. People are going to arrive at the conclusion irrespective. Take the GP for example, he/she correctly pointed out that Tesla is behind schedule. There is nothing wrong with that conclusion.
- ProAm 9y ago
dmode 9y ago
It IS a massive positive. The only reason you are complaining is because Musk set some super ambitious goals. But if you read the report, they are already producing as many Model 3s as Model S and S has been in production for 5 years. It is a monumental achievement for a company that only has been selling mass produced cars from 2012
saas_co_de 9y ago
It really reeks of desperation. They are frantically doing anything they can to keep investor confidence but all of their tricks are so worn out and tired now and their debt load and burn rate is so much higher that it isn't going to change anything. They will go bankrupt. 100%. Maybe they can arrange some buy out or merger to try and save face, but doubtful. Given their level of candor I am sure their accounting is an Enron style sh-t-show of epic proportions. That is almost certainly why they had to buy SolarCity. Other than paying off Musk and SpaceX loans they also couldn't afford to have the books opened in bankruptcy court because it would destroy Musk's reputation. It is coming though.
- mjamesaustin 9y ago
  If you're 100% sure, then you should dump your life savings into shorting Tesla. You'll make a fortune.
- dmode 9y ago
  I have been hearing this bankruptcy coming for the last 7 years. Yet, Tesla keeps delivering. I remember when the Model X production started, people had already written the obituary because of quality issues. The key thing to note is that Tesla's demand far outstrips supply and Tesla's customer satisfaction rate is over 90%. They can raise any amount of liquidity with those numbers.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    > They can raise any amount of liquidity with those numbers. 7.5% bond yield says no. > I have been hearing this bankruptcy coming for the last 7 years Yes, the anticipation makes it even sweeter. :) But seriously, they have been loosing money non-stop and at progressively higher rates for those entire 7 years, so what do you think is going to happen?
ksherlock 9y ago
“Winners compare their achievements with their goals, while losers compare their achievements with those of other people” -- Nido Qubein
throwawaydream 9y ago
Beyond all the spin, they stated the following important facts: - Produced 2020 cars and expect to produce the 2000 next week. - Tesla does not require an equity or debt raise this year I think these two facts laid to rest a number of concerns from last couple week: production rate, running out of money, moody's rating cut. The one major thing that's still pending is the last week's fatal crash. As far as I can tell, this is a great progress from where we were last week.
rcMgD2BwE72F 9y ago
The initial 2020 target was 500,000 cars (forecast made early 2016). Today, they maintain a production target for 2020 of… 1M cars. Despite the delays. They can achieve 50% of that goal and still be one of the best performing company in recent history. But you would probably insist that it's the biggest miss ever (only half the production target!).
- cjhopman 9y ago
  The initial 2018 target was 500,000 cars (forecast made mid 2017). Today, they are on track to make 120,000. When this particular company says that their 2020 target is 1M cars, it's a totally meaningless statement.

lallysingh 9y ago

Musk is a good salesman.

kbody 9y ago
Musk is a genius, but still not everything that a company does is done by the CEO.
- InitialLastName 9y ago
  > Musk is a genius, Apparently, Musk is a good salesman, especially of himself.
  - pm90 9y ago
    Come on, he can be a salesman and a genius. At least he is a very extreme determined and hard working person, if not an actual "genius" (whose brains are wired differently). People don't generally make a mid career change into rocket science and then have the most successful private rocket launch company.
    - InitialLastName 9y ago
      > People don't generally make a mid career change into rocket science and then have the most successful private rocket launch company ... except for the other successful entrepreneurs who made mid-career changes to fund private rocket launch companies: - Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) - Robert Bigelow (Bigelow Aerospace) - Jim Benson (SpaceDev) - Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic) I'll grant that Musk appears to be a successful businessman, and an effective leader, but his real strength appears to be selling his ideas so hard that even his most Boring (tm) projects get covered in giant piles of hype.
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        You forgot Carmack and Armadillo Aerospace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace
    - ubernostrum 9y ago
      Musk's standard operating procedure is to 1. Find a market where most or all of the fundamental R&D has already been done and paid for by someone else, and is publicly available to use 2. Enter that market, evolve/iterate the state of the art a bit 3. Promise immense economies of scale, and slather everything with glittery marketing and PR stunts This is what SpaceX is doing. This is what Tesla is doing. It is not a sign of "genius", and in both cases the promises Musk is making are... ambitious. There have been multiple attempts to bring down the cost of launching stuff into space, and with the smartest people in the world working on the problem we've seen only modest gains. Musk barged into the market and promised at least an order-of-magnitude reduction. So far that has not, to my knowledge, materialized, and I know of nothing in the pipeline which would magically cause it to do so (and economies of scale with things as expensive as space launches are uncharted waters). And with Tesla, Musk seems to have overpromised on production. But, amusingly, building a factory that cranks out cars -- even slightly-exotic cars! -- is kind of a well-understood problem. I strongly suspect the thing holding Tesla back is Musk's Silicon Valley "not invented here" mindset leading him to disdain the accumulated knowledge of the existing industry. Which is not a "genius" move, by the way.

adventured 9y ago

Their critics are very loudly proclaiming Tesla is an immense failure, that the Model 3 is a failure, and that they're going bankrupt in a matter of months. The FUD being broadly directed at Tesla is astounding and reeks of bias of one sort or another. The other major automakers are running years behind where Tesla is at today. That's where the embarrassment should be today: those automakers are still gleefully selling tens of millions of fossil-fuel-only vehicles. Producing 20,000 Model 3 vehicles per quarter this year will be an accomplishment (even in spite of Musk's absurd prior goal). It implies they can push well over 100,000 units in 2019. These days they're being given little credit for what they are accomplishing. When they hit that 20,000 quarterly marker, the Model 3 becomes one of the best selling mid-priced luxury vehicles on the planet in its first year.

elvirs 9y ago
they are given a ton of credit. their stock value was a good proof of how much credit they were given but you can't keep being late and not delivering on promises to hundreds of thousands of customers who made deposits while the CEO is busy building flamethrowers amd hats to sell them on twitter
- pavs 9y ago
  In case there is any confusion, Musk is not actually building flamethrowers and hats in person. His time is as wasted as saying "yes" to this ideas. Which is to say that not much at all.
  - cheerioty 9y ago
    I'm pretty sure those are his ideas ;)
danso 9y ago
How are the other makers "years behind" Tesla? The Model S is the best-selling EV but not by an order of magnitude. GM was pretty close last year in sales and I don't think it's a bad bet to bet that GM will beat Tesla in getting self-driving tech (GM Cruise is only second to Waymo in testing self-driving, at least in California). https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/30/the-5-best-selling-electric-cars-of-2017.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/30/the-5-best-selling... https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-self-driving-car-disengagement-2017 https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-s... Tesla deserves credit for getting other automakers to take the EV market seriously, but they are by no means years behind Tesla in terms of production and sales.

mgiannopoulos 9y ago

Why shouldn’t they be judged according to the performance of their competitors? If you aim high but your “failure” is better than the rest, it’s still something positive.

twtw 9y ago
The Model T is not a competitor.

empath75 9y ago

> If this rate of growth continues, it will exceed even that of Ford and the Model T. https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/

gwbas1c 9y ago

I never expected Tesla to deliver the Model 3 on time. I just "delayed" my order to AWD because my Leaf lease is up before I'll get the 2WD Tesla. (Also, because my wife wants a minivan and Chrysler now offers a plugin minivan.) Remember, no car in history ever had 500,000 pre-orders. No car even came close. If anyone expected Tesla to ramp up to that kind of production overnight, they are delusional. Besides, when I ordered my model 3, I assumed that it would be very late... So late, that I assumed I'd just wait for the AWD one to replace our AWD car.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
>Remember, no car in history ever had 500,000 pre-orders. No car even came close. If anyone expected Tesla to ramp up to that kind of production overnight, they are delusional. At the same time this is an admission that Musk is/was selling a delusion to people when Tesla set it's production goals.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Optimism isn’t delusional. They’re already making ~192k vehicles a year at their current 3/S/X production rate (which will only increase). You would have to be malicious or ignorant to think that can’t be scaled up to NUMMIs previous 350k/year run rate in the next 3-12 months. Disclosure: TSLA shareholder
  - danso 9y ago
    2017 was its best year, and it produced ~101,000 vehicles: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/3/16846860/tesla-2017-deliveries-model-3-production https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/3/16846860/tesla-2017-delive...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - Robotbeat 9y ago
      I believe he was referring to the NUMMI factory pre-Tesla, which produced about 6000 cars and trucks per week at its peak. It does seem like Tesla will soon (3-12 months) eclipse that record.

mariusmg 9y ago

>they measure themselves by their weakest performance, and suddenly their performance becomes historic. Yeah, is called PR. Shitty, but everyone does it.

ucaetano 9y ago

Yeah, and you need more than 2 data points to claim it is exponentially. This is bullshitty PR. TO: 10 vehicles T1: 40 vehicles Is production growing 4x per T, or 30 vehicles per T?

Robotbeat 9y ago
But there WERE more than two points; surely you know that. Q4 was not the first quarter that Model 3s were produced. Q3 of 2017 is. So that's three points. To use your example: T-1: 2 vehicles T0: 10 vehicles T1: 40 vehicles That is exponential. If it was only a linear ramp-up, that'd imply negative 20 Model 3s were produced in Quarter 3 of 2017. You might think this is being pedantic, or that "exponential" is just a buzzword, but it's not: the point about exponential ramp-up is that if you're off by a factor of, say, 4x in production, that may mean you're only behind a few months. A relatively small time change corresponds to a very large difference in production. Exponentials don't last forever; eventually a plateau is reached. But as you're bringing automation/production up, you're still in the exponential phase (as the data shows), and so small delays can make a big difference in production without telling you much about how many you'll produce once production is fully up and running.

thisisit 9y ago

> Way to spin all the production issues and delay of the previous quarter into a positive. I don't really like Musk but sending positive messages in Investment relations is the key to keeping the company afloat. At one of my previous employers we lost top 4 customers and 10% of our revenue. But, the investment relationship site said - "We are up 1% in revenue, if we discount top 4 customers". If Tesla admits and says - "We have improved but we are still behind on our original promise" then the stock price is going to drop like a rock.

misja111 9y ago
No, investors are not that stupid. They might buy these marketing talks for a while but eventually they will see through. The recent drop in Tesla's share price is a testament of that. "You can fool some people all of the time, and you can fool all people some of the time, but you can't fool all people all of the time."
- bald 9y ago
  Price is a function of supply and demand. So this tactic is better than the blunt tactic even if it manages to fool only one shareholder.
  - chillingeffect 9y ago
    Yes, it's about the ratio of shareholders you can fool all the time to the ratio of the shareholders you can't fool all the time.
- thisisit 9y ago
  I agree investors are not stupid. But, I never said it was about investors being stupid. It is simply not saying stuff which casts doubt about Tesla's ability to deliver. People are going to arrive at the conclusion irrespective. Take the GP for example, he/she correctly pointed out that Tesla is behind schedule. There is nothing wrong with that conclusion.
ProAm 9y ago

dmode 9y ago

It IS a massive positive. The only reason you are complaining is because Musk set some super ambitious goals. But if you read the report, they are already producing as many Model 3s as Model S and S has been in production for 5 years. It is a monumental achievement for a company that only has been selling mass produced cars from 2012

saas_co_de 9y ago

It really reeks of desperation. They are frantically doing anything they can to keep investor confidence but all of their tricks are so worn out and tired now and their debt load and burn rate is so much higher that it isn't going to change anything. They will go bankrupt. 100%. Maybe they can arrange some buy out or merger to try and save face, but doubtful. Given their level of candor I am sure their accounting is an Enron style sh-t-show of epic proportions. That is almost certainly why they had to buy SolarCity. Other than paying off Musk and SpaceX loans they also couldn't afford to have the books opened in bankruptcy court because it would destroy Musk's reputation. It is coming though.

mjamesaustin 9y ago
If you're 100% sure, then you should dump your life savings into shorting Tesla. You'll make a fortune.
dmode 9y ago
I have been hearing this bankruptcy coming for the last 7 years. Yet, Tesla keeps delivering. I remember when the Model X production started, people had already written the obituary because of quality issues. The key thing to note is that Tesla's demand far outstrips supply and Tesla's customer satisfaction rate is over 90%. They can raise any amount of liquidity with those numbers.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  > They can raise any amount of liquidity with those numbers. 7.5% bond yield says no. > I have been hearing this bankruptcy coming for the last 7 years Yes, the anticipation makes it even sweeter. :) But seriously, they have been loosing money non-stop and at progressively higher rates for those entire 7 years, so what do you think is going to happen?

ksherlock 9y ago

“Winners compare their achievements with their goals, while losers compare their achievements with those of other people” -- Nido Qubein

throwawaydream 9y ago

Beyond all the spin, they stated the following important facts: - Produced 2020 cars and expect to produce the 2000 next week. - Tesla does not require an equity or debt raise this year I think these two facts laid to rest a number of concerns from last couple week: production rate, running out of money, moody's rating cut. The one major thing that's still pending is the last week's fatal crash. As far as I can tell, this is a great progress from where we were last week.

rcMgD2BwE72F 9y ago

The initial 2020 target was 500,000 cars (forecast made early 2016). Today, they maintain a production target for 2020 of… 1M cars. Despite the delays. They can achieve 50% of that goal and still be one of the best performing company in recent history. But you would probably insist that it's the biggest miss ever (only half the production target!).

cjhopman 9y ago
The initial 2018 target was 500,000 cars (forecast made mid 2017). Today, they are on track to make 120,000. When this particular company says that their 2020 target is 1M cars, it's a totally meaningless statement.