How Will Tesla Build 400K Model 3s If It Can't Build 1K Model Xs per month?
Tesla’s Model X has now been on sale in the U.S. for one year. The six-figure, electric minivan/crossover thrills its fans, but the company that produces it, Tesla Motors, has been unable to show a delivery volume that is anywhere close to expectations.
When the Model X launched in September 2015, and deliveries began to trickle forth, Autoblog estimated that Tesla had about 26,000 pre-orders for the vehicle. These are customers who paid a deposit and got in line to wait for a Model X, and that number includes a few thousand cancellations. About two-thirds of those customers are still waiting now a full year after the first customer received a Model X. The Model S sedan was Tesla’s second vehicle after its initial Roadster. Wasn’t the Model S supposed to be the car with which Tesla perfected its factory and production abilities?
Inside EVs has been making sales estimates on Tesla vehicle sales for many years, and we applaud their stick-to-it attitude. They even follow up and grade themselves on how accurate their estimates are each quarter after Tesla is forced by SEC rules (law) to admit how few vehicles it has sold. Unlike every other automaker, Tesla hides its production facts from the public until it can’t anymore.
Inside EVs says that Tesla has delivered 9,754 Model X vehicles in the past year. In the early months, Tesla was shipping less than ten PER MONTH. In the past year, Tesla has only passed 2,000 units of Model X sales in a given month one time. It has delivered more than 1,000 in two consecutive months only one time based on Inside EVs tracking.
Given the production failures of the Model X, it seems obvious that Tesla is still a cottage industry manufacturer of high-end, custom built supercars. The company has its sights on selling hundreds of thousands of Tesla Model 3 and reports say the company has upwards of 400,000 pre-orders. The large battery factory Tesla is building is coming together, but have batteries been the reason the company has only been able to average about 800 units per month of its newest (third) vehicle? Not according to Tesla's Elon Musk, who blamed the shortage on "insufficient supplier capability validation, and Tesla not having broad enough internal capability to manufacture the parts in-house."