Stand and Produce: Elon Musk Mitts Off Very first Tesla Model three Production Cars
Eleven years ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk exposed the Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan. In it, Musk laid out the vision for his upstart electric-car company: Build an electrical sports car (the Tesla Roadster), use the profits “to build an affordable car” (which became Models S and X), and use that money to make “an even more affordable car.” Tonight, the very first Tesla Model three sedans were delivered to owners at the company`s factory in Fremont, California. It`s the culmination of Tesla`s decade-long quest to build that more affordable electrical car .
The company has taken more than 500,000 deposits for the Model Three, Musk said at a press conference early Friday, albeit he pleaded with reporters not to read too much into that number. “We did everything we could to unsell the car,” he said, asking people not to extrapolate “request from the reservation number.”
Tesla built a handful of Model three cars in July, and Musk claimed production will leisurely ramp up to Ten,000 units per week by the end of 2018. That would be somewhere around 500,000 Model 3s per year, five times the number of Model S and X vehicles the company makes today and almost as many cars as Volvo sold in 2016.
Musk describes the Model three production ramp as an S curve: slow growth in the beginning, followed by a rapid rise and a plateau. As he has done in the past, Musk noted that vehicle production can budge only as quickly as its slowest supplier can produce parts. About sixty percent of the car comes from the United States, with thirty percent coming from outside North America and ten percent from Canada and Mexico.
“I know I’m sandbagging a lot,” Musk said. “But we inherit force majeure risk from everywhere else in the world: floods, fires, tornadoes, burying ships—you name it. If there`s anything that interrupts the supply chain before we accumulate enough parts, that will interrupt the production ramp.”
Still, Tesla’s engineers and designers worked together to unwrap out unnecessary parts and to simplify production. Musk said a yearly production rate of 250,000 Model 3s can be built in the same amount of factory square footage that can turn out 50,000 Model S sedans, and he promised further improvements over time. The Model three has a big horizontal central touchscreen and no instrument-panel screen—unlike the Model S and X, which have a giant vertical display and a separate screen for the instrument cluster. There are fewer buttons: Things such as the side-view mirrors and the steering wheel are adjusted through the center screen and via buttons on the steering wheel, meaning fewer parts and switches are required. The car is half steel and half aluminum—steel is lighter to work with. The battery pack has three modules instead of the sixteen present in the Model S.
“There`s nothing in the Model three that doesn`t need to be there,” Musk said, indicating the company has learned from the production difficulties Tesla had with the complicated Model X. “Everything there has a compelling reason to be there.” Originally, all Model three production will be rear-wheel-drive models with the larger, longer-range battery.
“We’re attempting to have as close to a single configuration as possible as we boot up the production line,” said Musk. “We’re going to do everything we can to make cars as rapid as we possibly can.”