How Many Tesla Model 3 Cars Have Been Made?
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It's common to run two production shifts, but not three; one shift is needed for line maintenance. 1,000 per week indicates the production line is running, but having problems. This is much better than the few hundred per week from December, which meant hand assembly.
One line should top out at 2 shifts, about 5000 vehicles per day, or about 100,000 per year. Then add a second production line.
If you really want to find out what's going on in Tesla's plant, find a United Auto Workers organizer in a bar in Fremont and buy him a few beers.
It's a little abstracted and a little gamey, but the core feel is there, and I very much enjoy the logistics of it.
* what happens when there are supply chain hiccups?
* how much inventory do I want? Converting too much iron to steel will waste resources. What is the right mix?
* where is my bottleneck? Making anything else faster doesn't matter for overall production.
* every process has different time, space, and energy requirements. Running off of entirely electricity or fossil fuels both have pros and cons.
I've thought a bit about how it could be used to teach students in the classroom. It would be nice to have UI counters on the machines and setup a small factory. The concept of quality would also be a cool extension.
It's also just fun to look at the resources required to build a product from raw source. In real life the concept still applies - 10 lbs of ore will be a fraction of that once refined and a small fraction of that once formed and milled into a desk widget.
Then you said 5000/day, and I think you meant week, which lines up with the previous numbers, but then: how is that 100,000/year? ~5000*~50 is ~250,000/year. Do plants only run for 20 weeks/year?
Also, why only run a plant 5 days/week? It seems (admittedly, entirely naively of any industry knowledge here, like union rules) like each line should be capable of close to 350k/year at 1/minute for 16 hours a day.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_congruential_generator
https://static.ogstatic.com/images/articles/2017/11/02232742...
They are making 1,000 per week now (52k in a year at current rate) and have 500k reservations in line with $1,000 deposits?
So they need an order of magnitude increase in rate to fulfill the reservations in a year?
I didn't know much about car numbers and it seems about 387k Toyota Camrys were sold in 2017 for reference.
So yeah, IF (big if) they can keep it growing at the same exponential rate it'd take around 65-34 weeks [0][1] to deliver 500k cars from now with 10% and 20% growth rates respectively:
[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1+%2B+1.2+%5E+x)+*+10...
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1+%2B+1.2+%5E+x)+*+10...
At best you will have a step function as additional assembly lines come on.
OR you will have a max production ability, with various factors inhibiting that production ability such as part issues, failures, faults and so on.
So either the plant is not at full capacity, and there are production issues.
OR the plants are at full capacity and more lines are being added.
(and you can have the worst of both)
They are also planning to bring in a fully automated assembly line being shipped from Europe, in March. Assuming nothing goes wrong there it is supposed to accelerate production even more.
Yeah, hopefully they didn't make that assumption... Can't imagine debugging a whole assembly line (even a virtual one in a game like factorio is hell at the beginning)
The race is definitely on, which is great news for those of us who just want the best electric car :)
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-review/nissan/leaf/first-drive...
Is there a different model in Leaf the UK? The article you link to says "235 miles (NEDC)/177 miles (WLTP combined)" for the Leaf. Or is the way EV's are rated for range in the UK just different than is the US?
400 km (248 miles) using a Japaneses standard JC08.
241 km (150 miles) with EPA
380 km (236 miles) with NEDC
http://www.nissan.com.au/Discover/News/2017/September/06/The...
The European model is a delusional.
We own two electric cars: A Tesla P90D and a Chevy Bolt. The Bolt is an American Car, if that matters to you (it does for me) and has an EPA range of 238. (Consumer Reports got 250 in their tests).
We also have a car with an ICE -- a Chevy Volt. It gets 55 miles on all-electric, and has a gas engine too. Handy for when I have to do the occasional long drive and don't want to worry about superchargers, etc.
The Bolt isn't as glamorous as the Tesla S, but it's certainly nicer than the LEAF golf-cart.
Meanwhile, there is not real market share to quarrel over. There isn't a fixed number of EVs that will sell in 2019. It'll depend on price, consumer familiarity, supporting infrastructure...
btw... I think Musk has said things to this effect, at least back in TSLS's earlier days. I don't think they're worried about competing too much
And that isn't even taking into account that Tesla is burning through crazy amounts of cash already.
..I'm just skeptical that the last line of this article:
If Tesla can’t figure out how to make more cars soon, it could open a lane for rivals from Detroit and overseas to...
I don't agree. There is a big market here, it's basically the market for cars. There's no way Tesla could have ever held that whole market, I don't think they expect to and we shouldn't want them to. Within the market for cars, Tesla could be selling many times more cars than they are optimistically promising to make currently.
I think competition is, in this case, way down the list of problems. The problem is as they've been saying all along, they need to build more cars faster.
I just don't understand why car designers think it's OK to make ugly electric cars.
The craziest example is the i8 vs the i3. The i8 is lovely but the i3 is beyond ugliness. It's the same designers trying to build for the same line of cars. A regular BMW 3-series is no uglier than a 5 or 7-series.
Tesla built a beautiful car in my eyes. They took the look of an Aston Martin from what I see.
Then in a similar fashion as converting the style of a 7-series into a 3-series, they've managed to shrink and simplify the design whilst keeping the look. It's ridiculous that other car companies can't do this with electric cars.
I know it's pure vanity, but the Tesla is worth more simply because you don't have to wear dark glasses and a hat to drive it.
You see a Prius, it's ugly, but you know what it is right away, an economical hybrid. People who didn't know asked WTF is, and the car kinda sold itself. I think Toyota knew that the people lining up to buy them would not care about how good the car looked. They just knew that the Prius was the weird car they saw over and over that was a Hybrid.
I mean, most people don't even know the 1st gen Prius existed. They look like a regular car. They still got great economy, but IIRC the car didn't sell nearly as well as the newer, more ugly Prius.
A large part of why is that up til this generation of EVs (Chevy Bolt and new Nissan Leaf and others that are coming), they have really not made sense to drive far. You would have had to stop too often. They were in town or short (sub 30 miles) commute cars.
And having owned the previous generation Leaf for the last 3 years I can tell you 99% of our charging is done in our garage. Once in a while we park somewhere that has charging or my wife will luck into getting a charge spot in a parking garage. But we don’t take it on drives where we need a charging station to complete the journey. We have a gas car for those longer drives right now. But that will change with this new generation that have 40KWh+ batteries.
The cord is part of the fixed charged, and not my problem ... just like the hose on a gas pump.
with regards to my trip comment, the contorted thought processes people go through to justify one hour stops for full recharges plus what can be ten to fifteen minute side trips to charging stations should clue many in on how not ready it is. (and yes it is an hour if not more even for Tesla to fully charge and range dives in winter)
But everybody knows you need to stop a full hour to pee for every two hours of driving else you might die. Think about all the delicious restaurant meals and fun you haven't had because you never needed to wait for your ICE car to recharge in the middle of nowhere.
EDIT, because HN sucks...
70 MPH * 3 hours = 210 miles. You might want to talk to some normal humans who don't frequent superchargers.
The usual drill is to drive around 120 miles and then stop for 10-15 minutes to supercharge. So yes, that is a bit more stopping that I used to do.
Tesla has a trip planner at tesla.com/supercharger
For Palo Alto to SpaceX's factory, it recommends stopping for 50 minutes in Kettleman, which means you're charging for 13% of the trip time.
{Sorry about the comment about 3 hours to go 200 miles, I misread what you said as taking what Shivyeta said about stopping for an hour to charge at face value. Oh, and why do you think that insulting me is an appropriate response?}
Yeah, that was probably snarkier than necessary. But we increasingly live in our own little bubbles, and "folks hanging around the supercharger" is definitely a small one.
I’m not sure what other charging network i would refer to.
Have you seen Tesla's charging connector? It's way superior to the bulky standardized connectors. And as said by others, there really is no other game in town right now for long distance travel in an EV.
Disclosure: I own a Tesla Model S.
Assuming that a charger network was necessary for success, which I would argue it was, waiting for the others to catch up could have killed the company.
Note that there have still been no large-scale deployments of charging standards with more than 50-60kW of power, which is half what Tesla is currently deploying to most of its charging stations in North America.
BP are adding them on petrol forecourts too.
See this map for example https://www.zap-map.com/charge-points/
http://h4labs.org/tesla-is-approaching-1000-model-3s-a-week/
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These come in 3 categorys- full stop (machine breaks/quality so bad production cant continue), solvable (machine can produce at reduced rate) - and hidden (quality problem shows down the line).
Hidden are the meanest problems, because you have to traverse back up the tree to the producer of the problem- solve the problem, which may result in new problems - migrating back down the production line.
Try to not see it as a binary problem of release- not release, but more of a very complex longterm graph traversing problem.
Tesla is still producing cars completely manually.
This is why Musk bought the automation company Grohmann. But after he demanded they work 100h weeks (instead of their previous 35h weeks), and said unions would be unnecessary, almost the entire company quit and left.
That's the current bottleneck, automation of assembly.
So I can hardly believe that 100h per week were actually demanded.
Musk's cult doesn't work as well when workers are used to real protections.
This story of the 80-100h demands was actually in German news at the time, plus of course the complaints of making Grohmann dependent on a single car company.
Currently, a complete automated battery poduction line designed and built by the former Grohmann company, is being shipped to Nevada, after installation in March it is expected to double the battery output to 5000 per week.
Tesla executive Klaus Grohmann was ousted last month after a clash with Chief Executive Elon Musk over the strategy of Grohmann’s firm, which Tesla had acquired in November, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
This is blatantly false. Back in November they were doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xor2ubHr8Ag
The current bottlenecks are in the battery production at the Gigafactory, they screwed up and had too much faith in a contractor doing the battery pack assembly lines.
https://insideevs.com/musk-says-biggest-model-3-bottleneck/
> “To date, our primary production constraint has been in the battery module assembly line at Gigafactory 1, where cells are packaged into modules.” “We had to rewrite all of the software, from scratch. We managed to write 20 to 30 man-years of software in 4 weeks.”
It's a real issue for Tesla if they don't figure out how to build 500,000 cars per year within the next 2-3 years because then they open up a flank for the traditional car manufacturers who probably need 3-4 years before they can market EVs that can compare in specs with model 3, most notably on range.
At around 200 miles/320 km, an EV has a range that makes it suitable as a second car for the masses (as opposed to the passionate enthusiasts that might buy in already at 100 miles or less). 200 miles is enough for driving around the city. Currently, the Tesla models, Chevrolet Bolt, Renault Zoe, the new Nissan Leafs, and Opel Ampera, have such ranges. This is the range segment that the traditional car manufacturers are likely to open their first real bids for competitive EVs in from this year and through the next 3-4 years. Tesla can live with that since the segment is insufficient for the masses. Average Joe will not buy an electric car with a 200 mile range. Ever.
At around 300 miles/480 km, an EV could be a real primary car if you live in regions with sufficient charging stations. Currently, only the larger Teslas and Model 3 are there. This is where Average Joe starts to buy. But the larger Teslas are too expensive for Average Joe. As for model 3, it can hardly be called a car for the masses until it is produced for the masses. And therein lies the problem. If Tesla doesn't nail this range segment for higher end of the medium priced cars produced at scale in the next 2-3 years, some of the traditional car manufacturers may catch up. Don't forget that even if Tesla reaches 350,000 cars in 2019, which is still a big if, they still leave most of the chips at the table. They will have to go way beyond 1M cars yearly to really close the upper medium price range for the traditional manufacturers. Even 500,000 cars would leave most of the market for a handful of it's competitors. And it would require one or two more Giga Factories to reach a million, which they haven't started to build yet. As for the lower priced cars, Tesla is not there yet, and the traditional car manufacturers may well get there before Tesla if they get to experiment for 4-5 years with the medium priced cars without loosing too much money. So Tesla really needs to hurry.
Around 400 miles/640 km, range is no longer an issue for almost any buyer. The few exceptions are buyers in rural areas or buyers that need to commute very far to and from work every day in cold weather or in mountain regions. A 100 mile commute to work in subzero temperatures, and/or in mountain regions would mean that you would have to be very sure that your car is fully charged every day, which would be too much of a hassle. But apart from such edge cases, most people could skip charging for a full working week and still use a car with 400 miles range for commutes. And on road trips, they could drive as far as is comfortable anyways, and if once every few years they needed to drive further than 400 miles, they would likely have passed several charging stations on the way. Currently, no cars are there, but Tesla will likely be first in this segment with the larger models S and X, quite possibly within 1-2 years. Those cars are not for the masses. It's not unreasonable to believe though, that model 3 will have such range in 3-4 years.
At 500 miles/800 km, the range issue is solved for 99 percent of potential buyers in the modern world. Tesla claims its new Roadster will have such range. It is still to be seen whether that is true, but anyways, that car is not for the masses. But maybe in 7-10 years, this will be standard in the smaller Teslas...
Even at 300 mikes range, my wife would not drive an EV, due to range anxiety. She won’t even drive my Leaf (she calls it a golf cart). This range anxiety is all psychological, and it’s the main thing hindering EV adoption.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1110149_tesla-model-s-b...
If Tesla doesn't nail this [300 mile] range segment for higher end of the medium priced cars produced at scale in the next 2-3 years, some of the traditional car manufacturers may catch up.
I'm not sure about that. No one else is coming close to making batteries as cheap as Tesla's. The Chevrolet Bolt has 200 mile range but each one Chevvy sells is an $8000 loss because they have made it artificially cheap. Unless the other car manufacturers get started with their own huge battery factories, they are going to stay years behind.
Also: the Renault Zoe and Nissan Leaf are rated at 150 miles (EPA), not 200 miles as you suggest. Teslas and the Chevrolet Bolt are the only 200+ mile cars by the EPA standard.
Making an affordable 200+ mile EV is very difficult. That's why Tesla are building the biggest factory in the world.
Better batteries and more competitors producing cars with different characteristics will vastly increase the market size. That means the incumbents could grab most of the market, but Tesla could still sell lots of cars and be profitable.