It was less than a month ago that Tesla CEO Elon Musk choked up when talking at his company’s shareholder meeting after he received an overwhelming majority vote to continue as CEO. He then gave a goal of 5,000 Tesla Models 3s produced in a week by the end of June, and it looks like he did it.
Musk tweeted the good news Sunday. According to Reuters, the company met the 5,000 Tesla Model 3 goal, and adding the Model X and S cars it produced within the week, it built a total of 7,000 vehicles. The company’s vehicle report soon confirmed that the company not only met the goal, it exceeded it by a margin of 31 Model 3 cars.
When the Model 3 went into production in July 2017, the goal for the end of the year was to produce 5,000 cars per week and increase that number to 10,000 cars by the end of 2018. That didn’t happen. Instead, there were months in the remaining 2017 which resulted in just a few hundred cars made. For the first half of 2018, production improved but was still hovering around 2,000 Model 3s per week in March.
It was in April that Musk explained the issue causing “production hell” was focusing too much on automation. There were stages of the line that relied solely on robots when humans could execute the job more efficiently. Then at the beginning of June, in order to improve production, a large tent went up outside of the Tesla factory. In the tent was another line to help produce more cars and also save money.
Tesla will release an official Model 3 delivery report within the next couple of days to report the production numbers. Musk and other executives will likely say more about the future of the company during the second-quarter earnings call, which will happen sometime in August.
With the Model 3 production in order, Tesla can begin work on new vehicles and Musk can reveal what is the “cyborg dragon” he said he’s building.
Correction: Tesla produced 5,000 Models 3s along with additional Model S and X vehicles to produce a total of 7,000 vehicles in the last week of June. A previous version of this article had the figures listed incorrectly. Inverse regrets the error. (7/1/18)
