esla faced withering cynicism from the media this week, driven by uncertainty about the Model 3.
The cynicism/criticism was especially intense because during the third quarter the company was only able to make 260 of its first mass-market vehicle. Green Car Reports said, "Just 260 Tesla Model 3s built in three months" (headline) while adding in the body that "The news for October deliveries was, to put it bluntly, not good." (Tesla had originally planned to produce 1,500.)
But that headline was on the charitable side compared to many of the reports, which evinced a lot of existential angst. "Tipping-Over Point for Tesla: Great Cars, Weak Production Lines," said Extreme Tech. Or "Tesla's 'Hell' Threatens Its Future," said Jalopnik.
In some ways it feels like a hell of Tesla’s own making, owing to aggressive targets and promises it’s having trouble keeping up with.
here were plenty of other references to "Hell." Sleepless nights, broken robots and mounting pressure: Musk offers rare glimpse inside Tesla’s ‘production hell’ -- said the Washington Post. Which cited these comments from Musk in the conference call, referring to Dante's Inferno.
I was really depressed about 3 or 4 weeks ago when I realized that we're kind of in level 9, then we got to level 8, now I can see sort of a clear path to sunshine. And so I feel really pretty optimistic right now. If you talked to me 3 weeks ago, I would have been quite pessimistic and I was sort of quite down in the dumps.
--Elon Musk
Going forward, you have to wonder how many more moments like this Musk will have -- only to reveal them much later (or not at all).
Meanwhile Bloomberg echoed other stories in the financial press, "Tesla Sparks Fresh Cash Concerns After Model 3 Rollout Stumbles."
While Musk has brought in more than $3 billion this year from equity, convertible bond and debt offerings, his electric-car maker has burned through about $2.6 billion in cash during just the last two quarters...the stock has traded at the lowest intraday level in six months late this week
--Bloomberg (November 3)
Stock-price-centric blogs had no shortage of scary headlines like, "Conference Call Confirms Tesla's Model 3 Faces Huge Problems."
Earnings/Model 3 recap: To recap: Tesla lost $619 million over the third quarter, a record-high quarterly loss. The company attributed Model 3 delays to a number of things, including the Model 3's high level of automation ("challenging in the early stages of the ramp"), in its quarterly update to shareholders. But the biggest "production constraint has been in the battery module assembly line at Gigafactory 1," the company said in the update.
(Musk described battery module assembly in more detail on the earnings conference call. "There are four zones to module manufacturing...The zones three and four are in good shape, zones one and two are not. Zone two in particular...we had a subcontractor, a systems integration subcontractor, that unfortunately really dropped the ball.")
Attention all Model 3 reservation holders -- revised goal is 5,000-per-week by end of March: Musk said that Tesla would not reach its production target of 5,000 electric cars a week by December 31. And reports quickly ensued of day-1 reservation holders in California and New York "seeing a pushback in delivery date by approximately one month." Along these lines, Musk, in the earnings conference call, updated the production target. "We expect to achieve a production rate of 5,000 Model 3 vehicles per week by late Q1 2018, so probably sometime in March," he said.
And what about the previous target of 10,000 units a week by the end of 2018? "Just to be clear, we are trying to get as fast as we can to 5,000, and then we will work as fast as we can to get to 10,000," said CFO Deepak Ahuja during the call. So that's not a hard target anymore.
by
B. Crothers , CONTRIBUTOR
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2017/11/05/tesla-week-model-3-elon-musk-get-banged-up-by-media-after-earnings-report/#392ff6607cd5
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