Tesla doubled its weekly Model 3 production in Q1
It's been promising to do better for months now.
Today, Tesla issued a press release regarding its Model 3 production in the first quarter of 2018. The company produced 34,494 vehicles total; 9,766 of those were Model 3. The release noticed that Model 3 production was a fourfold increase over Q4 of 2017, and Tesla anticipates continuing to increase Model 3 rate by quarter.
Tesla has been in the limelight because of its recent Model 3 production woes. The company spent most of the fourth quarter of 2017 addressing its bottleneck issues, and was confident that the problems had mostly been ironed out by the beginning of 2018. The company was targeting 2,500 Model 3s a week, with 5,000 by the end of Q2. Last week, it produced 2,020 Model 3 vehicles.
It appears as though this release from Tesla is a response to an article from The Information yesterday about the company's persistent Model 3 problems. According to the article, Elon Musk has taken "direct control" of the process in order to smooth things out. The release claims that the company is on track to meet its 2018 goals for both Model S and Model X delivery. It will be interesting to see what happens over the course of the year, and whether the company is able to finally fix its production problems.
