Tesla shows signs of a Model 3 surge
It’s been a rough quarter for the rollout of Tesla’s Model 3. There were faulty robots at the Nevada battery factory and an idled production line in California. Reservation holders from San Diego to Brooklyn saw their delivery times pushed back. What should have felt like a cascade of electric cars flooding American streets seemed more like a trickle.
Now, with less than two weeks left in the quarter, CEO Elon Musk is looking to make up for lost time. “Just got back from Gigafactory,” he said on Twitter before dawn Thursday. “Will be at our Fremont factory in the morning. Tesla team is going all out.”
Those efforts appear to be paying off.
Bloomberg is tracking the Model 3 rollout with an experimental tool that estimates production using vehicle identification numbers. Our model estimates that Tesla is making 805 Model 3s a week, for a total of 10,636 cars so far. But that tells only part of the story. We track two sets of VIN data, and both are showing indications of significant improvement to come.
Our model is, by design, slow to respond to such changes in the data. In order to avoid overreacting to unusual batches, we’ve averaged our production rates over time. That means our model’s current estimated production rate is still being held back by February’s temporary manufacturing pause. We expect the improving trend will continue next week based on the data we’ve already received.
Both of our methods are designed for long-term accuracy, but they take some time to register sudden shifts. The tracker currently shows Tesla making 810 Model 3s a week, up from 693 in the prior week. However, we think our model may be underestimating what’s going on at the Tesla plants. Based on some of the numbers we’re seeing, we think it’s possible Tesla already could be producing more than 1,000 a week and climbing.
That doesn’t make up for all of Tesla’s first-quarter production woes. Many Tesla Model 3 owners are reporting a wide variety of quality problems. It remains to be seen whether the production boost carries a cost in quality. At the start of the year, Tesla said it already was capable of cranking out 1,000 Model 3s a week and would finish the quarter at 2,500 a week. Bloomberg’s model suggests Tesla is still nowhere near where it wanted to be — but there’s still one week left to make up some ground.
Randall writes for Bloomberg.
