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.
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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.
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).