Tesla Misses the Mark on Model 3 Production

Tesla Model 3 production has fallen short of expectations after hitting production snags: the company said it had produced only 260 Model 3s at its Fremont, California plant in the third quarter, well short of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s plan to roll 1,600 off assembly lines by the end of September. That means the automaker will need to push harder to achieve its goal of building 5,000 Model 3 vehicles per week by the end of 2017, and at least 500,000 vehicles of all models annually by 2018.

Tesla’s Oct. 2 investor letter blamed Model 3 delays on “production bottlenecks” from manufacturing subsystems taking longer to activate than expected. “It is important to emphasize that there are no fundamental issues with the Model 3 production or supply chain,” Tesla wrote. “We understand what needs to be fixed and we are confident of addressing the manufacturing bottleneck issues in the near-term.” Musk has often described an “S-curve” for Tesla’s production plan in which small batches of vehicles lead to rapid expansion of volume and then level off.

Cause nothing says quality like a rush job.

It would be interesting to have had social media and instant updates back when Ford and other big name manufacturers started. Wonder how far off their original projections where during their infancy? How many failures or manufacturing errors occurred that weren't broadcast on every news outlet?

farscapesg1 said:

It would be interesting to have had social media and instant updates back when Ford and other big name manufacturers started. Wonder how far off their original projections where during their infancy? How many failures or manufacturing errors occurred that weren't broadcast on every news outlet?

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Occurred?

Every time a a Tesla catches fire or the "autopilot" malfunctions it makes the news. What about a transmission blowing out on a new Model T or an issue with the engine on a newly built one back in the day? I would seriously doubt that there were occasional issues back in their infancy. Heck, even just go back to the 70's or so and what are the chances there were occasional "lemons" that rolled off the production lines that someone ended up with? If a "lemon" rolls off the Tesla production today.. the news outlets, car enthusiasts, and social media have a freaking field day.

Meh, I know someone working on their production line doing controls programming. They are building the automation as they go, working crazy hours, etc. It may be taking longer than 'expected' but they also weren't ready at all when they launched. My understanding is that things are getting alot better though, so they may ramp up soon.

farscapesg1 said:

Every time a a Tesla catches fire or the "autopilot" malfunctions it makes the news. What about a transmission blowing out on a new Model T or an issue with the engine on a newly built one back in the day? I would seriously doubt that there were occasional issues back in their infancy. Heck, even just go back to the 70's or so and what are the chances there were occasional "lemons" that rolled off the production lines that someone ended up with? If a "lemon" rolls off the Tesla production today.. the news outlets, car enthusiasts, and social media have a freaking field day.

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Hell, there are still issues with producing vehicles with uniform quality among the major brands today. My brother-in-law had a brand new pickup that went back to the dealer 5 times for electrical issues (one that resulted in a fire under the dash) before he said "fuck it" and made them buy it back. Look at the recent recalls for airbags, ignition switches, etc

farscapesg1 said:

Every time a a Tesla catches fire or the "autopilot" malfunctions it makes the news. What about a transmission blowing out on a new Model T or an issue with the engine on a newly built one back in the day? I would seriously doubt that there were occasional issues back in their infancy. Heck, even just go back to the 70's or so and what are the chances there were occasional "lemons" that rolled off the production lines that someone ended up with? If a "lemon" rolls off the Tesla production today.. the news outlets, car enthusiasts, and social media have a freaking field day.

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I believe the entire idea of a car initially was seen as rediculous by most people.
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/...orical-retrospectives/doesnt-pay-pioneer.html
https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/blogs/horses-horsepower-rocky-transition
http://www.playle.com/listing.php?i=PAPERSTAND246038

farscapesg1 said:

It would be interesting to have had social media and instant updates back when Ford and other big name manufacturers started. Wonder how far off their original projections where during their infancy? How many failures or manufacturing errors occurred that weren't broadcast on every news outlet?

Click to expand...

It's taking longer than Tesla expected. It's happening about at the pace people who have been doing this for a long time said it would. Odd that.. must be total coincidence that the companies that made.. well.. ALL the cars to date knows how long it takes to bring up a specific rate of production from scratch. It's almost like they have previous experience with this.

Other brands deal with the EXACT same shit about production speculation. They are just smart enough to not make absurd ass promises on time lines, and thus the speculation is only the domain of fan boards, rather than the news.

andrewaggb said:

Meh, I know someone working on their production line doing controls programming. They are building the automation as they go, working crazy hours, etc. It may be taking longer than 'expected' but they also weren't ready at all when they launched. My understanding is that things are getting alot better though, so they may ramp up soon.

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And we'll see how ready "ready" is when the vehicles hit the market and have to actually survive scrutiny by an end customer. My guess is they won't seriously outpace the industry and will have an annual capacity of about 300-350k units per year going at about the two year mark on the production line being developed.

Tesla is doing pretty well as an auto upstart. They make a bunch of bullshit claims. Mostly with their imaginary model 3 time lines, and with their autopilot claims. If they'd tone that shit down, it'd probably be going even better for them.

farscapesg1 said:

Every time a a Tesla catches fire or the "autopilot" malfunctions it makes the news. What about a transmission blowing out on a new Model T or an issue with the engine on a newly built one back in the day? I would seriously doubt that there were occasional issues back in their infancy. Heck, even just go back to the 70's or so and what are the chances there were occasional "lemons" that rolled off the production lines that someone ended up with? If a "lemon" rolls off the Tesla production today.. the news outlets, car enthusiasts, and social media have a freaking field day.

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I know, right?!? It's like, how dare a computer forum call attention to news related to a high-tech related car company?

It is a high profile company, by design of it's CEO, in the news. I assure with 100% confidence that there were a ton of negative news articles related to Model T's when they first came out, celebrating every failure and calling for its demise at every chance. Nothing new, no need to get upset over it.

Elon Musk is a more ambitious Chris Roberts (Star Citizen), which some of you will appreciate, and some won't. I've got a Day 0 Model 3 reservation, by the way. Eastern time zone unfortunately, so it'll be a while until I can order mine.

farscapesg1 said:

It would be interesting to have had social media and instant updates back when Ford and other big name manufacturers started. Wonder how far off their original projections where during their infancy? How many failures or manufacturing errors occurred that weren't broadcast on every news outlet?

Click to expand...

I wasn't there but I can tell you right off the bat that you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that Elon Musk is quite the idealist. The guy comes up with a new off the wall whack idea every month, starts another company every 2 weeks. Do you really think that anything his companies do is really getting much attention from him. If you knew a person with the exact same personality as Elon Musk in real life who was not a billionaire, you would have a very different description of them. You would probably call them a Liar. You would talk about how they constantly make promises they cannot keep, they have no basis in reality. No one anywhere in the real auto industry was surprised that a guy who was hand building cars and losing money hand over fist on Tesla would miss the mark on Model 3s, given he hasn't ever made a real production line yet and he made bogus claims about how fast he could get it running. But lucky for musk, just like Steve Jobs, he is one of those leaders that people will throw billions of dollars at anything he says and yes if you or I or a lot of people had billions of dollars you might be surprised what kind of things we could successfully make. I appreciate that Musk is trying for off the wall ideas and pushing much more realistic leaders to do a little more. I appreciate that he has no fear of failure, probably because he is such a megalomaniac he doesn't actually think that anything he does could possibly fail. But more realistic people should know that hes off the wall on a lot of things. And if you actually thought he was going to meet targets on the model 3 I have a bridge to sell you. Musk is just a big version of a kickstarter. A bunch of people jumping into all sorts of businesses they aren't even really good at. I am just sort of melodramatic about the fact that people do not put any weight in honesty any more. The guy is like 2.5 billion in the hole on Tesla, missing almost every mark he sets and people just keep saying its ok. At what point do you go and say hey, how about you get honest, but then I realize that honesty doesn't pay in the world. If you tell a person their Model 3 will come a year later, they wont preorder, if you tell an investor that the payoff might come 10 years down the road they won't invest. Instead you lie to them and tell them something much sooner and they hand over the money. Then you just make excuses when you miss another mark. I liked the comparison to Star Citizen.

To me the biggest crime of this all is probably that I bet just like Steve Jobs, Musk is just a Family destruction machine over in his companies. He over promises, then forces employees to over work because they can't meet his unrealistic targets they were never going to meet unless everything went 120% perfect.