Production Rate (incl manufacturing waves)

They are coming ...

Elon Musk just tweeted :
"Tesla made 100 vehicle bodies this week for the first time. Really proud of the team! Pic of S/N 396: pic.twitter.com/fZzbUIjn"

 

That's the way I took it - 100 frames made. The number painted, assembled, and delivered are probably all different as well.

 

Also interesting that they have produced at least 396 skateboards in total. Did someone say 500 in Q3...?

 

It would appear as though they've entered the steep part of the S-curve? If the current trend (doubling production every week) continues, they'll be at 1600 cars/week in 4 weeks.

This is excellent news.

 

To clarify, the way I read the tweet was that they made 100 chassis in one week for the first time. They'd better have made way more than 100 of these in total by now! Not sure what the time lag would be from chassis to completed car, but I'd expect that these are for cars further back in the queue, and that they've probably already made a few hundred of these in the aggregate since June, but never 100 in one week.

 

Don't think they anticipate 1600/week.

 

I thought AO meant they completed 80 finished units this week (full assembly).

100 frames in one week working 7 days and 2 shifts works out to about 7-8 frames/shift. Hope the process can be tuned in a little better to do the doubling everyone is talking about in the next week or two.

 

That would be an annual rate of 83,000 cars per year. Yeah, I hope Tesla doesn't hit that, or they really WILL be demand limited instead of supply limited....and quickly!

 

They can start delivering Model X earlier then, perhaps. (Not that I would care about that.)

 

Oops, yeah, no, that's not going to happen. So they're actually only 3 weeks away from max production rate? 400 per week would give us just over 20,000 per year.

 

When I got back into the production queue, I thought "Oh, I won't get my car before 2013."

At *this* rate of ramp-up, I have the horrible realization that I might get it earlier! Now I have to settle all my outstanding questions about the car *fast*, including checking out the seats.

I guess I can always postpone -- for tax reasons it's better for me to get the car in 2013 anyway.

Not a problem I was expecting! :wink:

 

You will definitely NOT get your car in 2012. The ramp up definitely has an upper limit planned, and if all goes well, then yes--it's possible Tesla will hit their max rate in a few weeks.

 

Regarding geographic batching, I just Googled and found that a typical car-carrier truck carries 8-10 cars. So I would expect regional batching of 8-10 at a time; more than that doesn't gain much in the way of economies of scale.

If Tesla gets big they would start shipping by train, which would be suitable for *much* larger batches -- 500 or more at a time -- and the Tesla Factory is rail-connected, but it seems they're not doing that yet (or we would have heard about them activating a loading dock of some sort). If Tesla did this they'd probably set up secondary distribution centers, since very few people live in the right place to get their cars directly off the train.

I assume batching would be larger overseas, where it's all about the ship transport; I doubt Tesla will try to fill an entire ship (those things carry over a thousand cars each, and that's the small ships), but they'll probably try to assemble loads as large as reasonably possible.

- - - Updated - - -

That was the announced target for a *single shift* rate of production... and they're hiring a second shift.

So, with the second shift, that's a ramp up to 800 a week, which is just over 40,000 a year.... yeah, I guess I won't see my car in 2012 (whew) but my chassis will probably be going down the line in January, so they'll probably be asking me to configure before the end of the year (eek).

 

From what we know, they're not aiming for 40k a year. *Maybe* 30k, if things go better than planned.

 

I thought they were aiming for 20K a year!

So what's going on with the night shift? Perhaps it's just optimism bias, and they decided they couldn't hit 20K per year with one shift.

 

Or, temporarily to make sure they hit 5,000 for 2012.

 

Yeah, Tesla should certainly be able to produce 500 vehicle bodies in Q3 (and have a week left for possibly completing them).

 

The statement in the last stock holder meeting was that the soft target was 500 deliveries. They were very specific about that.
I have not expected them to hit that number for quite some time. I do expect them to hit the 5000 number by the end of the year. The ramp up took just a little to long for this quarter.
However, I am also ecstatic that they put such a premium on quality and I think an extra week or two is well worth it.