10 ms·

Tesla Q2 2018 Vehicle Production and Deliveries

117 points by reddotX 8y ago

Someone1234 8y ago
That's good news. As an aside what is the real world version of "technical debt?" Tesla's tent factories has helped them accelerate manufacturing, but is that a technical debt they'll have to come back and fix later? I've also read people speculate it could increase warranty return/recall rates due to contaminants (e.g. dirt, dust, etc) in the tents, which if true, could be another source of future debt.
- robertk 8y ago
  I doubt they will retain them. They were a temporary setup to get to the goal. It’s back to factories as usual now.
- mcot2 8y ago
  This is addressed in the statement. The “tent” is GA4. So far there are no quality issues and they expect to keep this line around, producing over 1,000 cars per month alone next month. GA3 at 5,000 plus GA4 at 1,000 equals their 6,000 goal for August. “GA4, our new General Assembly line for Model 3, was responsible for roughly 20% of Model 3s produced last week, with quality from that line being as good as our regular GA3 line. We expect that GA3 alone can reach a production rate of 5,000 Model 3s per week soon, but GA4 helped to get us there faster and will also help to exceed that rate.”
- stetrain 8y ago
  I would think that the real technical debt is inside at their first super-automated GA line. They now have the second line in the temporary structure which let them test some different methods and can provide some pressure relief while they rework the main GA line. They have been planning to expand and build new buildings at the Freemont plant for quite a while now [1], so I would expect the 'Tent' line to move to a more permanent location eventually. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8s9913/teslas_tent_was_planned_years_ago_as_part_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8s9913/teslas_... Edit: As someone in the reddit comments pointed out, the new Tent/GA4 line is on the location of an already planned new building (#11 in the drawing), so perhaps the line stays in place and a more permanent building is built around it.
- karthikb 8y ago
  I bet there are some steps within the tent that have better yields or better QC than inside the factory (others are undoubdtedly worse). How do those effectively get transferred over? Thats technical debt.
baggachipz 8y ago
It's a great day to be a shareholder and owner. :)
- robertk 8y ago
  I agree, as an owner of a total market index fund.
- swarnie_ 8y ago
  If Musk is good at one thing its crushing shorts.
swarnie_ 8y ago
I always find the forced PR photos a bit strange, is this normal for a lot of companies across the pond?
- mu_killnine 8y ago
  I've work for a company that does these from time to time and they've always been optional. For big milestones, there are typically quite a few people who are genuinely excited and it's nice to see photos like these posted in the lobby for posterity. If I was crunching at Tesla for months I'd probably want to be in this picture, too. As long as it's optional for folks that want to join in, I actually see it as a nice thing (for us it's a time where we can hang out with the CEO a bit, something that's rare for as large as we are)
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  Yeah, my former company used to take a group photo every year outdoors on the small patch of grass our parking lot had.
- berkeleyjunk 8y ago
  Don't work for Tesla but I always found these (forced team photos) to be interesting to look back to in the future, especially for the projects I was involved in. They bring back good memories!
- SEJeff 8y ago
  In the US Army, they'd make us pose for shoots like this after something we jokingly called "Mandatory Fun". You can come to this totally optional event to promote $SOMETHING this weekend, and if you do, you get the day off Monday. If you don't, you get to scrub the halls, wax the floors, and inspect the vehicles at the motorpool. It was optional "technically", but mandatory in reality.
aerovistae 8y ago
What I wouldn't give for someone to do a scraping project on HN comments on past submissions for Tesla, to create a timeline of "predictions Tesla will fail to meet a certain goal" vs "date of Tesla successfully meeting that goal." I would find that really interesting.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- api 8y ago
  It's quite obvious to me that sometime last year a huge astroturf effort against Tesla was launched. My guess would be hedge funds shorting Tesla and then attempting to depress the stock. There's precedent for this. I thought it was illegal but maybe I'm wrong or maybe the SEC is just asleep.
  - mcot2 8y ago
    Yes I think that is quite clear now. What has surprised me is the extent to which the tech community has followed along. If anything, we should be the people that know Musk overpromises on timelines, but has an insane track record for delivering (eventually).
    - api 8y ago
      People remain naive about online propaganda and the extent which "shill mills" influence social media. This industry has done a remarkable job keeping itself out of the limelight. There are legitimate reasons to be skeptical of Tesla, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a tidal wave of sudden strong anti-Tesla (and anti-Musk in general) stuff that started hitting social media. For me the "tell" is that a lot of it repeats the same talking points or variations of them or even the same phrases and slogans. You also had obvious astroturf sites like "stop Elon Musk from failing again" popping up around the same time. Shortly after I saw that appear I heard people online (and off!) using that exact phrase and other exact talking points. That is a propaganda campaign. You don't get that organically. There are companies that will do this for any cause you'd like as long as the payment clears. For a few million you could probably increase belief in the flat Earth by a factor of 10-100. It's a fairly large industry. The human mind is for sale.
ckastner 8y ago
> For the first time, Model 3 production (28,578) Interestingly enough, the Bloomberg model 3 tracker's [1] estimates appear to have been quite accurate: 2018-03-31: 12,383 2018-06-30: 39,872 ====== diff: 27,489 [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/
- abhiminator 8y ago
  It's fascinating to observe how close Bloomberg tracker's prediction came in forecasting the actual production numbers using nothing but the the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) of in-the-wild Model 3's as well as those from the NHTSA database. Talk about the boons of being a publicly traded company.
  - ragebol 8y ago
    Sounds a bit like the German tank problem {0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
    - nwah1 8y ago
      Fascinating. Excellent reference.
  - thisisit 8y ago
    Given VIN data is public, I think it's more about boons of recognizing public data scraping and presentation. I am sure there companies out there collecting and building profiles of even private companies based solely on publicly available data.
- bdz 8y ago
  Here are the almost daily reports based on the NHTSA data https://twitter.com/Model3VINs https://twitter.com/Model3VINs
syntaxing 8y ago
I'm surprised how small the production team is (judging only by the picture). For some reason I expected there to be much more people.
misja111 8y ago
That's amazing, but when reading through the numbers in the article this makes me wonder: ".. Q2 production totaled 53,339 vehicles, a 55% increase from Q1, making it the most productive quarter in Tesla history by far. For the first time, Model 3 production (28,578) exceeded .." So the total Model 3 production was 28,756 in Q2, which is on average only 2212 vehicles per week. It seems that they have been able to pull up the production rate to above 5000 only in the very last week. Nevertheless that's an astonishing achievement.
- stetrain 8y ago
  Yes, but as far as I know that was the stated goal. From the May 2nd financial results letter: "We continue to target Model 3 production of approximately 5,000 per week in about two months, although our prior experience has demonstrated the difficulty of accurately forecasting specific production rates at specific points in time because of the exponential nature of the ramp." http://ir.tesla.com/static-files/1b240f1e-b519-4b40-b14b-fea44698c3af http://ir.tesla.com/static-files/1b240f1e-b519-4b40-b14b-fea...
  - bildung 8y ago
    5000 per week also was Musks prediction for december 2017: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/881757617416056832 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/881757617416056832
    - opencl 8y ago
      The goal wasn't 5000 per week, it was 20000 per month. They have achieved the former but not the latter. This requires actually sustaining the production rate which has so far been highly violate with lots of temporary total shutdowns for retooling.
    - stetrain 8y ago
      Yep, and they've taken plenty of knocks for failing to meet that stated goal and having to re-adjust and set new forward goals.
  - 8y ago
thisisit 8y ago
When is Tesla's quarterly call? Anyone knows their dial code. Because this is going to get interesting and I really want to listen to the live call.
- billh 8y ago
  Tesla does a live webcast of these calls on their investor relations site at http://ir.tesla.com/ http://ir.tesla.com/ The next quarterly update will be sometime early August.
flexie 8y ago
When you read through the announcement and you realize that this is a company that even if it doubled it's current production rate it would still have orders for the close to a year's production, then you have got to pause and be amazed. How many Model 3s could Tesla produce at its current facilities? 7,000? 10,000? 15,000? It wouldn't be enough to remotely satisfy the demand. Truth is that once delivery picks up, more people will start to order since currently people like me think it's pointless to order a car that you would have to wait a year to get and that - in most parts of the world - you can actually not order yet. The orders are likely to increase proportionate to the production capacity as Model 3 will be made available around the world. This company could build 3 Giga Factories around the world that each produce 10,000 Model 3s per week and demand would still not be met. Heck, they could have 10 Giga Factories and they might still not satisfy demand for Model 3. And then there is the future demand for Model Y and - once they get economy of scale and battery prices go down a bit - demand for cheaper, smaller cars. All this demand could be met by other car manufacturers if they too produced long range EVs of similar or better quality than combustion engine cars. But no-one does and no-one will for an other year. Don't say Nissan Leaf; it's not long range. And when they finally do, in 2-3 years or so, are you going to take a chance on one of the first competitive EVs from VW, Mercedes, BMW, Ford, General Motors, Hyundai, Fiat, Toyota or Mazda or are you just gonna stick with Tesla, which by then comes with even better specs than today? Tesla is the Apple of the car world. There is still room for other producers to make the Android cars that spend 3-4 year playing the catch up game of being one-two models behind in specs, and then maybe finally catch up in 5-10 years. But Tesla will get the better customers and the fat margins if the traditionalists don't hurry. And hurry a lot.
- baxtr 8y ago
  I believe Apple was more or less profitable from day 1. How do you compare Apple to Tesla?
  - applecrazy 8y ago
    I believe OP was referring to how current gen smartphones were at least a few years “behind” (in terms of underlying tech and software) when the iPhone first came out, leaving the rest of the industry to play a catch-up game.
pwinnski 8y ago
Kudos to Tesla. I've been a somewhat vocal skeptic on a lot of things Tesla-related, and this is still two quarters later than initially promised, but I'm still impressed. It's been hard to tell from the outside whether "late" just meant "we underestimated this, so we're late", or if it meant "we underestimated this so badly we'll never get there." Even when I started to believe it would just be a matter of time, I was concerned that there wouldn't be enough capital to get here. But flamethrowers or whatever got us here, and I'm impressed.
- slouch 8y ago
  Flamethrowers were Boring Company. Roadster 2 and Semi reservations probably helped, though.
sidcool 8y ago
I am pleasantly surprised. Did not expect Tesla to reach that goal before at least October. Great job Team Tesla. Congratulations. With that aside, it's going to be even more challenging maintaining the pace.
sctb 8y ago
Some other threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17436604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17436604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17437408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17437408

117 points by reddotX 8y ago

That's good news. As an aside what is the real world version of "technical debt?" Tesla's tent factories has helped them accelerate manufacturing, but is that a technical debt they'll have to come back and fix later? I've also read people speculate it could increase warranty return/recall rates due to contaminants (e.g. dirt, dust, etc) in the tents, which if true, could be another source of future debt.

robertk 8y ago
I doubt they will retain them. They were a temporary setup to get to the goal. It’s back to factories as usual now.
mcot2 8y ago
This is addressed in the statement. The “tent” is GA4. So far there are no quality issues and they expect to keep this line around, producing over 1,000 cars per month alone next month. GA3 at 5,000 plus GA4 at 1,000 equals their 6,000 goal for August. “GA4, our new General Assembly line for Model 3, was responsible for roughly 20% of Model 3s produced last week, with quality from that line being as good as our regular GA3 line. We expect that GA3 alone can reach a production rate of 5,000 Model 3s per week soon, but GA4 helped to get us there faster and will also help to exceed that rate.”
stetrain 8y ago
I would think that the real technical debt is inside at their first super-automated GA line. They now have the second line in the temporary structure which let them test some different methods and can provide some pressure relief while they rework the main GA line. They have been planning to expand and build new buildings at the Freemont plant for quite a while now [1], so I would expect the 'Tent' line to move to a more permanent location eventually. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8s9913/teslas_tent_was_planned_years_ago_as_part_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8s9913/teslas_... Edit: As someone in the reddit comments pointed out, the new Tent/GA4 line is on the location of an already planned new building (#11 in the drawing), so perhaps the line stays in place and a more permanent building is built around it.
karthikb 8y ago
I bet there are some steps within the tent that have better yields or better QC than inside the factory (others are undoubdtedly worse). How do those effectively get transferred over? Thats technical debt.

baggachipz 8y ago

It's a great day to be a shareholder and owner. :)

robertk 8y ago
I agree, as an owner of a total market index fund.
swarnie_ 8y ago
If Musk is good at one thing its crushing shorts.

swarnie_ 8y ago

I always find the forced PR photos a bit strange, is this normal for a lot of companies across the pond?

mu_killnine 8y ago
I've work for a company that does these from time to time and they've always been optional. For big milestones, there are typically quite a few people who are genuinely excited and it's nice to see photos like these posted in the lobby for posterity. If I was crunching at Tesla for months I'd probably want to be in this picture, too. As long as it's optional for folks that want to join in, I actually see it as a nice thing (for us it's a time where we can hang out with the CEO a bit, something that's rare for as large as we are)
WhompingWindows 8y ago
Yeah, my former company used to take a group photo every year outdoors on the small patch of grass our parking lot had.
berkeleyjunk 8y ago
Don't work for Tesla but I always found these (forced team photos) to be interesting to look back to in the future, especially for the projects I was involved in. They bring back good memories!
SEJeff 8y ago
In the US Army, they'd make us pose for shoots like this after something we jokingly called "Mandatory Fun". You can come to this totally optional event to promote $SOMETHING this weekend, and if you do, you get the day off Monday. If you don't, you get to scrub the halls, wax the floors, and inspect the vehicles at the motorpool. It was optional "technically", but mandatory in reality.

aerovistae 8y ago

What I wouldn't give for someone to do a scraping project on HN comments on past submissions for Tesla, to create a timeline of "predictions Tesla will fail to meet a certain goal" vs "date of Tesla successfully meeting that goal." I would find that really interesting.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
api 8y ago
It's quite obvious to me that sometime last year a huge astroturf effort against Tesla was launched. My guess would be hedge funds shorting Tesla and then attempting to depress the stock. There's precedent for this. I thought it was illegal but maybe I'm wrong or maybe the SEC is just asleep.
- mcot2 8y ago
  Yes I think that is quite clear now. What has surprised me is the extent to which the tech community has followed along. If anything, we should be the people that know Musk overpromises on timelines, but has an insane track record for delivering (eventually).
  - api 8y ago
    People remain naive about online propaganda and the extent which "shill mills" influence social media. This industry has done a remarkable job keeping itself out of the limelight. There are legitimate reasons to be skeptical of Tesla, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a tidal wave of sudden strong anti-Tesla (and anti-Musk in general) stuff that started hitting social media. For me the "tell" is that a lot of it repeats the same talking points or variations of them or even the same phrases and slogans. You also had obvious astroturf sites like "stop Elon Musk from failing again" popping up around the same time. Shortly after I saw that appear I heard people online (and off!) using that exact phrase and other exact talking points. That is a propaganda campaign. You don't get that organically. There are companies that will do this for any cause you'd like as long as the payment clears. For a few million you could probably increase belief in the flat Earth by a factor of 10-100. It's a fairly large industry. The human mind is for sale.

ckastner 8y ago

> For the first time, Model 3 production (28,578) Interestingly enough, the Bloomberg model 3 tracker's [1] estimates appear to have been quite accurate: 2018-03-31: 12,383 2018-06-30: 39,872 ====== diff: 27,489 [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/

abhiminator 8y ago
It's fascinating to observe how close Bloomberg tracker's prediction came in forecasting the actual production numbers using nothing but the the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) of in-the-wild Model 3's as well as those from the NHTSA database. Talk about the boons of being a publicly traded company.
- ragebol 8y ago
  Sounds a bit like the German tank problem {0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
  - nwah1 8y ago
    Fascinating. Excellent reference.
- thisisit 8y ago
  Given VIN data is public, I think it's more about boons of recognizing public data scraping and presentation. I am sure there companies out there collecting and building profiles of even private companies based solely on publicly available data.
bdz 8y ago
Here are the almost daily reports based on the NHTSA data https://twitter.com/Model3VINs https://twitter.com/Model3VINs

syntaxing 8y ago

I'm surprised how small the production team is (judging only by the picture). For some reason I expected there to be much more people.

misja111 8y ago

That's amazing, but when reading through the numbers in the article this makes me wonder: ".. Q2 production totaled 53,339 vehicles, a 55% increase from Q1, making it the most productive quarter in Tesla history by far. For the first time, Model 3 production (28,578) exceeded .." So the total Model 3 production was 28,756 in Q2, which is on average only 2212 vehicles per week. It seems that they have been able to pull up the production rate to above 5000 only in the very last week. Nevertheless that's an astonishing achievement.

stetrain 8y ago
Yes, but as far as I know that was the stated goal. From the May 2nd financial results letter: "We continue to target Model 3 production of approximately 5,000 per week in about two months, although our prior experience has demonstrated the difficulty of accurately forecasting specific production rates at specific points in time because of the exponential nature of the ramp." http://ir.tesla.com/static-files/1b240f1e-b519-4b40-b14b-fea44698c3af http://ir.tesla.com/static-files/1b240f1e-b519-4b40-b14b-fea...
- bildung 8y ago
  5000 per week also was Musks prediction for december 2017: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/881757617416056832 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/881757617416056832
  - opencl 8y ago
    The goal wasn't 5000 per week, it was 20000 per month. They have achieved the former but not the latter. This requires actually sustaining the production rate which has so far been highly violate with lots of temporary total shutdowns for retooling.
  - stetrain 8y ago
    Yep, and they've taken plenty of knocks for failing to meet that stated goal and having to re-adjust and set new forward goals.
- 8y ago

thisisit 8y ago

When is Tesla's quarterly call? Anyone knows their dial code. Because this is going to get interesting and I really want to listen to the live call.

billh 8y ago
Tesla does a live webcast of these calls on their investor relations site at http://ir.tesla.com/ http://ir.tesla.com/ The next quarterly update will be sometime early August.

flexie 8y ago

When you read through the announcement and you realize that this is a company that even if it doubled it's current production rate it would still have orders for the close to a year's production, then you have got to pause and be amazed. How many Model 3s could Tesla produce at its current facilities? 7,000? 10,000? 15,000? It wouldn't be enough to remotely satisfy the demand. Truth is that once delivery picks up, more people will start to order since currently people like me think it's pointless to order a car that you would have to wait a year to get and that - in most parts of the world - you can actually not order yet. The orders are likely to increase proportionate to the production capacity as Model 3 will be made available around the world. This company could build 3 Giga Factories around the world that each produce 10,000 Model 3s per week and demand would still not be met. Heck, they could have 10 Giga Factories and they might still not satisfy demand for Model 3. And then there is the future demand for Model Y and - once they get economy of scale and battery prices go down a bit - demand for cheaper, smaller cars. All this demand could be met by other car manufacturers if they too produced long range EVs of similar or better quality than combustion engine cars. But no-one does and no-one will for an other year. Don't say Nissan Leaf; it's not long range. And when they finally do, in 2-3 years or so, are you going to take a chance on one of the first competitive EVs from VW, Mercedes, BMW, Ford, General Motors, Hyundai, Fiat, Toyota or Mazda or are you just gonna stick with Tesla, which by then comes with even better specs than today? Tesla is the Apple of the car world. There is still room for other producers to make the Android cars that spend 3-4 year playing the catch up game of being one-two models behind in specs, and then maybe finally catch up in 5-10 years. But Tesla will get the better customers and the fat margins if the traditionalists don't hurry. And hurry a lot.

baxtr 8y ago
I believe Apple was more or less profitable from day 1. How do you compare Apple to Tesla?
- applecrazy 8y ago
  I believe OP was referring to how current gen smartphones were at least a few years “behind” (in terms of underlying tech and software) when the iPhone first came out, leaving the rest of the industry to play a catch-up game.

pwinnski 8y ago

Kudos to Tesla. I've been a somewhat vocal skeptic on a lot of things Tesla-related, and this is still two quarters later than initially promised, but I'm still impressed. It's been hard to tell from the outside whether "late" just meant "we underestimated this, so we're late", or if it meant "we underestimated this so badly we'll never get there." Even when I started to believe it would just be a matter of time, I was concerned that there wouldn't be enough capital to get here. But flamethrowers or whatever got us here, and I'm impressed.

slouch 8y ago
Flamethrowers were Boring Company. Roadster 2 and Semi reservations probably helped, though.

sidcool 8y ago

I am pleasantly surprised. Did not expect Tesla to reach that goal before at least October. Great job Team Tesla. Congratulations. With that aside, it's going to be even more challenging maintaining the pace.

sctb 8y ago

Some other threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17436604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17436604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17437408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17437408