Tesla's Mad Model 3 Production Dash

[William Maley]

Saturday night at Tesla's Fremont, California assembly plant was a sight to behold.

"...packed with people Saturday evening as the last hours of the quarter drew to a close. Red couches and tall white tables were set up outside, a DJ played music and a truck selling Vietnamese food was on hand," Bloomberg reports.

Was Tesla was celebrating an important milestone? No, the company was using this to try and motivate their workers to get more Model 3s out the door to provide some good news for investors.

The past week could be considered one of the worst for the electric car maker.

• Moody's downgraded Tesla's credit rating further into junk status due to production issues and growing obligations.
• The NTSB has opened a new investigation into Tesla after a driver was killed when his Model X crashed into a barrier and caught fire. 
  • "Unclear if automated control system was active at time of crash. Issues examined include: post-crash fire, steps to make vehicle safe for removal from scene," the NTSB wrote earlier in the week.
  • Yesterday, the NTSB said it was "unhappy" with Tesla releasing information into the crash on their blog. The NTSB has a long history of guarding their investigations very closely. Part of this is due to the board being a small agency, which means it relies quite heavily on the participants involved in an investigation.
• On Thursday, Tesla recalled 123,000 Model S vehicles built before April 2016 for a power-steering issue.
• Yesterday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted a number of tweets, saying the company had gone bankrupt. It was an April Fool's joke, but it did not go over so well.

In early trading this morning, shares in Tesla dropped as much as 5.7 percent.

Tesla estimated they would deliver 10,000 Model 3s by the end of the first quarter. We'll likely find out in the next few days whether or not Tesla was able to pull this off when their first-quarter report comes out. But a number of analysts believe Tesla came up short.

Source: Bloomberg

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[A Horse With No Name]

They will go the way of the Dodo bird...into the ashes of history. 

[Scout]

I read an article talking about how a very large percentage of Tesla cars coming of the line could not be delivered to customers because they had problems right of the line that have to be fixed before delivery.  I'm not so sure further rushing production is a good idea for them.   

[Robert Hall]

This whole volume manufacturing thing seems to be something Tesla is really having difficulty getting right...history is full of startup car companies that have failed for one reason or another.   

Right off, I can't think of any independent car maker launched in the last half-century that is still around an thriving.  

Edited April 2, 2018 by Cubical-aka-Moltar