How many Tesla Model 3 electric cars can be built this year? It was an amazing question to have been asked in the auto industry. How quickly is it possible for Tesla to put this car into mass production? When is it possible and how many can it build by this year? Moreover, how many can be actually delivered to the customers?
With a promised starting price of 35,000 dollars, Model 3 is the latest moonshot by Tesla and the company hopes that this car will make them a mass-market producer, along with a profitable one. According to the promises and statements made by Tesla, the Model 3 volume production could be about to start.
On the analyst conference call of 4th May after the declaration of Tesla’s first-quarter 2016 earnings. Elon Musk, the CEO discussed about the possibility of starting production in the coming July. It is a bit of a confusing thing and at the same time, it does create some amount of churn because people are wondering what is the real date.
It seems like they have to take the July date seriously in order for some particular date that is a few months from now or some number of months in terms of the real date.
Therefore, in order to be confident of getting volume production of Model 3 by late 2017, they have to set a date of mid-2017 and hold people’s feet to the fire, both externally and internally, to really achieve the actual volume production date of late 2017.
As a rough guess, they wanted to say that they might be able to produce somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 units of Model 3 during the second half of the next year. Right now, that is Elon Musk’s expectation.
Eight months ago, Tesla hoped that they would build 100,000 Model 3 cars between July and December of this year. Considering the demand for Model 3, they have decided to advance their 500,000 total unit build plan (including Model X, 3 and S) to 2018, which is two years earlier than what was planned previously.
Increasing the production five-fold during the next two years will be quite challenging and it will require some additional capital as well. However, that is their goal and they will definitely work hard to achieve it successfully.
The company further had 373,000 deposits of 1000 dollars each on Model 3s as of August last year. It is indicating that the planned production of 2017 along with some portion of 2018 has already been vouched for. Last year, 84,000 cars were built by Tesla and 76,000 were delivered. It missed its lowered goal of 90,000 at the same time.
People are wondering whether Tesla can actually produce 100,000 cars by 31st December. According to the analysts and auto-industry executives along with financial analysts, it would be a stretch. According to their new time estimate, delivered by Adam Jones of Morgan Stanley, the new estimate stands.
Street Insider covered his forecast on Tesla Motors on 19th January which upgraded his recommendation on the stock and at the same time, revised the estimates on vehicle production. Jones had earlier projected that Model 3 production would start only at 2018 end and no cars at all produced this year. He revised his projections, adding 75,000 additional units of Model 3 to their 2018 estimate along with 100,000 to their 2020 estimate.