Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

No increase over Q4 2020. Has Tesla stated a production goal for 2021?

It should be noted that the S/X production lines have been partially offline in Q1 while refitting for the model refresh.

I also wonder if Tesla is impacted by the supply chain issues hammering a lot of the other automakers.

View on HN

Due to market seasonality you shouldn't compare the quarter with the previous one. It would be more accurate to compare Q121 with Q120. In that comparison they increased almost 80%

They usually state production goals but didn't for 2021. I'm pretty sure internally they're aiming for a million delivered this year.

Also the fact that Q1 beat Q4 is quite the feat since the S/X lines are down and Q1 is a terrible quarter for automakers.

Q1 sales are always lower than the previous Q4.

I believe they don't have yearly production goals, but Musk has stated that they aim at growing at 50% over the long-term [1]. These are some snippets for short-term forecasting from Tesla Q4 Earnings:

'Over the past few weeks, we have been upgrading our Freemont Factory to launch the new Model S and Model X'

'Gaga Shanghai has demonstrated the ability to sustain Model 3 production at or above a run rate of 250,000/year'

[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/27/tesla-tsla-earnings-q4-2020....

[2]https://tesla-cdn.thron.com/static/1LRLZK_2020_Q4_Quarterly_...

I'd assume that in terms of automakers affected by bottlenecks at TSMC Tesla would be the most impacted.

I wonder about that. Tesla might be an electronic (as well as electric) car, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were fewer subsystems and fewer chips overall.

I'd expect most car electronics to be on fairly old process nodes, 90nm or something like that. It's mostly the Tesla "Full Self Driving" stuff that I'd expect to be on a leading-ish edge node and also have a decent area.

I don't follow this closely but somehow I'm not surprised the growth is flat, it seemed to me that they were expanding production in many countries so energy went into that until it ramps up aggressively when factories are done (hopefully lessons were learned so it's gonna be a smooth ride).

year over year is much more indicative than quarter-over-quarter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com