Tesla’s Very first Affordable Car Is Ultimately Injecting Production – MIT Technology Review
Tesla’s Very first Affordable Car Is Eventually Injecting Production
- by Jamie Condliffe
- July Trio, 2017
Elon Musk has announced that the Model Trio, his automaker’s cheapest car yet, will begin to roll out of the factory as soon as Friday.
The vehicle, which will cost around $35,000, is Tesla’s very first attempt at winning over mainstream car buyers. In the past, the automaker has produced vehicles squarely targeted at the luxury end of the market—with its Model S costing almost $70,000 before any extras are added.
Tesla will supply the fresh Model three sedan to its very first thirty customers on July 28, which just meets the promised July deadline set out by Musk. But in building a populist car, the company must make it in quantity—indeed, 400,000 people have already paid $1,000 deposits to secure one of the vehicles.
The projections for enhancing output are as ambitiously Muskian as ever. The automaker will build just one hundred of the cars in August, but it hopes to increase that to 1,500 in September, then 20,000 in December. In 2018, it aims to pump out 500,000 of the vehicles in total, and then increase that to one million by 2020.
Musk says that Tesla’s very automated production line has been designed to make that possible. The Model three production line is intended to use fewer and fewer humans as time goes on—ideally until there are none to get in the way of the robots. “You can’t have people in the production line itself, otherwise you drop to people speed,” he has said.
But as we’ve explained in the past, it is unclear whether Tesla’s facilities can keep up with the dramatic rates of enhanced production that Musk promises. While America’s largest auto plants do crank out more than 500,000 vehicles a year, they are established and stress-tested facilities that have leisurely built up to that capacity. Tesla, meantime, will be debugging its facilities while enhancing output at breakneck speed.
It’s not unlikely, and if anyone can do it, it most likely is Musk. He is, after all, a man who said he’d recycle rocket boosters, received incredulity from incumbents in the space industry, and then went right ahead and displayed them all it was possible. Scrape that: he made it look effortless.
But Musk has a hit-and-miss track record when it comes to meeting his self-imposed deadlines. While Tesla may this week hit its target for having the vehicle very first roll off the assembly line, ensuring that they keep rolling at a swift enough rate will be fairly another challenge.
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