Yes Yes, demand was so strong for the Model S and Model X it required massive discounts at the end of the 2017 to get rid of them... Last I checked and abundance of inventory does not mean high demand.
Once again Tesla spin, do people really believe there is a high demand for Model S and Xs??
Tesla stopped making Model S and Model X so the people that build them could work on building Model 3's. Tesla has never built 5000 cars in a week does anyone believe they can build that many Model 3's and continue making Model S's and X's in ONE PLANT? Past stories have stated that the Fremont plant was out of space. (from Elons mouth).
As someone pointed out up thread, Model S production has not stopped, they just switched over to making right hand drive cars.
Tesla's real capacity problem? Too many employees
If Telsa had bought another plant strictly for Model 3 production then maybe they would be up to speed by now. Instead they are trying to cram another line amongst a plant set up for a two completely different vehicles that dont share parts.
Current situation is not good, its one big *hit show.. building a cheap car was not a good idea.
The Model 3 and Model S/X do not share too many major components, but I'm sure they share a lot of smaller parts. I believe Elon said the Model S/X now has the motors and inverter from the Model 3 and the autopilot hardware is pretty much the same across all products. I suspect a number of other components are also shared.
Building a reasonably priced, mass production car was always part of the plan. Staying an exclusive high end brand was never seriously considered.
One of the big challenges for any car start up is to figure out how to actually build cars profitably. That's where most car companies started since the 30s have failed. GM, Ford, VW, etc. learned to mass produce cars decades ago. Hyundai learned to do it selling cheap poor quality cars to the third world. The more complex a machine, the more difficult it is to make it reliably.
The biggest error with the Model X roll out was they didn't include enough input from manufacturing and ended up with a very difficult to build car. The Model 3 is far easier to build, but every new design has problems. Whenever a company introduces a new car design, there are always problems the first year or two. And that's from companies who have been doing it for a century. Toyota always tends to be among the most reliable cars because they change designs the slowest among the major auto makers.
When rolling out any new product, the thing that bites you the hardest is usually the thing you didn't think was going to be a problem. It becomes a problem because you didn't think it through. One of the problems with the Model 3 has been welding steel, which is an old tech that every other car company mastered decades ago, but Tesla's manufacturing didn't think it through because it was old tech, but it was new to Tesla and it became a problem.
One of the problems at the Tesla plant with parking is they have build more buildings that were there in the NUMMI days. To build new buildings usually requires taking out parking and/or storage space. When they built the new buildings, they should have built a parking garage, but they may not have thought that through because it was an old idea.
Tesla is definitely not perfect, they have made mistakes at almost every step getting here, but they have always overcome whatever the latest obstacle was. Every company has a corporate culture which has strong points and weak points. One of Tesla's strong points is a willingness to flex as the situation demands. Whatever needs to happen to fix the latest problem, it usually happens, even if it's a radical change.
