Diving into this Daily Kanban report, there are a few big issues straight up and I'm hoping we can crowd source some of this.
1) There was a non-compliant thermal oxidizer, A1002, that was spewing too much NOx. Tesla self reported this in 11/2014, and the schedule for remediation has the installation of new equipment by 1/2016.
2) That timing co-incides with the installation of the new paint shop... Daily Kanban points to the Authority to Construct Permit Application that was approved on July 9, 2015 as information that shows that Tesla was constructing the "North Paint Shop" while decommissioning the "South Paint Shop." There's a 1 year startup period, for which Tesla was limited to 25 vehicles per hour.
3) This is where the Daily Kanban goes off the rails. We know they are using the new paint shop. They have to be in order to hit the volumes they are hitting now. The Daily Kanban doesn't find a Start-Up Notification, nor a subsequent permit to operate. And so they conclude that the construction hasn't yet exited the startup year.
Here's where you come in... can anyone confirm the switch over to the North Paint Shop? I'm thinking it was Q1 2016, and the one year startup has already finished.
4) Then the next part is really suspect. There is a limit to the amount of VOC per gallon and an estimate to the amount of paint in gallons per vehicle. Daily Kanban uses the maximum permitted VOC per gallon in their calculations. This is where people can mislead, this is where Mr. John Petersen would make his mark since they know that most people don't bother with research or analysis. Anything lower than that amount of VOC per gallon changes their calculations, and possibly dramatically.
Here's where someone with more knowledge on the amount of VOC per gallon in automotive painting can help.
5) Daily Kanban makes the assumption that the amount of paint per vehicle is the same as the rest of the industry. They make the argument that while Tesla doesn't make full size SUVs, pickups, Tesla also doesn't make compact and subcompact cars. Then they show this nice scatter plot of gallons of applied solids and annual auto production from 1998/1999, making the assumption that things haven't changed much since then:
Note that for their claimed 244,584 gac/year, they then conclude that the amount of vehicles that Tesla can produce a year is 200,000. But if you look at that plot, at the 250,000 gallons of applied solids, the annual auto production range is 175,000 to 250,000. There are quite a few at right around 250,000.
Then the assumption on the amount of paint per vehicle really doesn't hold up. There is a lot of glass on Tesla's vehicles. The amount of paint used per Tesla Model S and X is likely far lower than industry average, as the vast majority of Model S's have pano roofs and the Model X has the biggest glass windscreen ever put into a production vehicle. The X itself isn't nearly as big as the big SUVs, much less the mini-vans and the amount of paint in a pick-up. The big automakers make a lot of SUVs and pickups. Their error level here is likely significant.
There's a slew of assumptions here, and many of them specifically against Tesla.
Eisenmann constructed a state of the art paint shop for Tesla. Hard to use very old data and permit limit VOC's to make estimates. Eisenmann themselves said it was capable of 500,000 vehicles. How that is measured, we don't know. The Model 3, however, also has a lot of glass on top. The amount of paint is likely low for its size.
Musk did make some comments about the paint shop, and the two phased expansion of the shop. I believe the North Paint Shop is in full operation and more expansion is yet to come, but it would be nice to hear from the rest of you with more specifics.
Given their error levels, I can easily see 300,000 as the limit right now. And 300,000 limit in 2017 is, well, not a problem for Tesla. That's, say, 150,000 Model 3's and 150,000 S+X, or whatever breakdown you want to make. And clearly, Tesla is still working on expansion to the full 500,000 mark in 2018 as the North Paint Shop upgrade isn't finished.
