"In the last seven working days of the quarter, we made 793 Model 3's, and in the last few days, we hit a production rate on each of our manufacturing lines that extrapolates to over 1,000 Model 3's per week" - from Tesla's release.
Also another 860 Model's in transit currently that will count in Q1. It's getting there.
Yeah, this HN headline seems intentionally negative considering their current weekly production rate is somewhere between 40%-60% of what they produced in all of Q4. Therefore focusing on their total Q4 is misleading regarding their current production. Why not use the article's actual headline?
EDIT: And now the headline has been changed to match the article. Good move. The original headline on HN was something along the lines of "Tesla only delivered 1,550 Model 3s in Q4".
That's interesting because I strictly copied the title over from Reuters website. You can see the same link still goes to the article... yet the title on Reuters has been changed.
Putting my tin foil hat on, someone at Reuters stockpiled their stock or truly loves the company :)
It is pretty common for an article that is written about breaking news like this to be heavily edited as time goes on. The last edit on the article is listed as occurring after I left my comment. I would bet the original headline was written in a rush and eventually one of the editors at Reuters had the same objection as I did and rewrote it with a less negative slant. In fact, the current headline is even more positive than the one I last saw and that currently appears on HN. They appended "despite progress" at the end.
I guess I'm just wondering what fraction of investors decision to hold TSLA is "We never believed Musk's deadline to begin with" and what fraction is "It's only a 6 month delay, so not a big deal"
From my point of view it looks like they are trying to do something that would normally take 5 years in 2. Even if they "fail" and it takes 3 years, that's still faster than the "normal" way.
That's assuming that they take longer than they said, but still get a functioning plant. They could, alternatively, after 3 years, end up with a plant that doesn't work, and won't work in another three years. Manufacturing is difficult, and "delayed" isn't the only failure mode.
Yes but that's always a risk, and I don't think that's any more of a risk with Tesla than it would be for any other manufacturer.
We know that manufacturing can be done at the scale they need, because many others do it at that scale. So in my mind, the odds that they end up with a non-functioning plant is pretty small. They have a lot of capital, and no shortage of people willing to invest.
Compare that with SpaceX. They tried to do something that only a few others have ever attempted (reuse rockets reliably and inexpensively) and the US government had basically failed at (with the shuttle not being inexpensive by any means). This was coming from a rocket company that had just had their first 3 launches end in failure, was nearly broke, and was the laughingstock of the industry.
But Musk doubled down, and poured a ton of his own money into the company and they were eventually able to achieve their goals (more honestly, i'd say they have currently achieved about 70% of what they wanted, but most of the other 30% is still possible, just taking a lot longer than they though). And while you could make the argument that Musk wouldn't do something like that with Tesla, I think it at least shows that he's not one to give up when things start looking really really bad.
