Yep. And Original plan was initial production by end of 2017. I'm fairly certain the old constraint was the need to control CapEx burn rate. That's no longer the constraint.
What's the new critical path item(s) for a quicker launch?
This is getting into long-term rather than short-term again (sorry).
I believe that the launch *cannot* be made quicker -- it's the sort of problem discussed in The Mythical Man Month -- the critical path for the launch is design of the car and design of the assembly line, and they can't be sped up. As Elon tweeted, they are going to try to make the *ramp-up* quicker. Which is not the same thing.
I believe the critical path for making the ramp-up quicker is land purchase and governmental permitting for construction of additional factories.
Tesla can solve the problem of ramping up to 500K per year in 2019 rather straightforwardly.
But in order to ramp up to more than that in 2019 or 2020, they need *new locations*. Land negotiation and permitting has proven to be a really slow process *every time*, for every Supercharger site, for every service center, for the Gigafactory, and even for the Tesla Factory -- remember model S was basically delayed a year while Tesla tried to get a good deal on the factory.
Tesla needs to start lining up the sites for the additional factories (both assembly plants and Gigafactories) now even if they don't intend to start construction for 2 years. Because it's likely to take that long to get the deals done.
