production

Tesla’s stock price (TSLA) surged by 7% in after-hour trading after the release of its first quarter 2016 financial results. The reason for the surge wasn’t as much about its earnings, but because of its new Build Plan.

The automaker announced that it is advancing its 500,000 units per year guidance by two years to 2018. Tesla says that the new production plan is in reaction to the over 400,000 Model 3 reservations it received since the unveiling last month.
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Earlier this month, Tesla confirmed that it is currently working on increasing its production plans to minimize the wait for the Model 3 following the storm of reservations it received for the $35,000 all-electric sedan – approaching 400,000 cars as of the latest update. The vehicles are set to be manufactured at Tesla’s main factory in Fremont, California.

While Tesla plans to manufacture about 90,000 vehicles in 2016, the company always refers to the Fremont plant’s total capacity to be around 500,000 cars per year once optimized, which is what Toyota and GM were producing when they owned the factory, and it also plans to add more manufacturing capacity in other regions.
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Bjørn Nyland, a Tesla vlogger based in Norway, won a free Founders series Model X through Tesla’s referral program. The limited edition status of his car will make him one of the first owner in Europe and he now reports that his SUV finally entered production this week.

Several other European Model X reservation holders are now reporting having received confirmation that their vehicles entered the production phase this week.
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In an email sent out last night (see below), Tesla confirmed that following the overwhelming number of Model 3 reservations it received, the company is currently “increasing its production plans to minimize the wait for Model 3” – something Elon Musk hinted Tesla was looking into after witnessing the long lines of people waiting at Tesla’s stores to reserve the $35,000 long-range all-electric vehicle.
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Tesla’s wheels are generally recognized as a strength of the company’s designs and when Tesla unveiled the Model 3 last week, we weren’t disappointed by the prototype’s wheels. The automaker actually displayed a few new wheel designs during the event.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed tonight that the automaker has now over 232,000 reservations for its newly unveiled Model 3:

[tweet https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/716089404985487361 align=’center’]

Musk has been updating the public on the Model 3 reservations tally which has blown past the most optimistic predictions.
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Financial news publication Valuewalk published an article earlier this week titled: “Tesla Gigafactory To Get Delayed By Three Years“. The publication has since completely changed the headline to “Tesla Gigafactory construction ahead of schedule” after Tesla issued a statement stating that the battery factory is “ahead of schedule on both construction and production”.
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After delivering only a few hundreds Model X’s late last year, there’s been doubts about the current state of production ramp up of Tesla’s new all-electric SUV. We now learn that several reservation holders who turned their reservations into orders are now receiving Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN) as high as 5,000 and up, which could indicate a significant acceleration of the production ramp up.
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As we reported last week, although we have been hearing less about them lately, Rimac Automobili has been hard at work and the Crotia-based electric automaker grew from 20 to 150 employees during the past 2 year, with now plans to go on a hiring spree and double its headcount in 2016.

Now the automaker is ready to show off its hard work at the Geneva Motors Show next week, where it will debut the “production version” of the Concept_One all-electric supercar, which the company is now calling a “hypercar”.
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Tesla and Panasonic have undoubtedly the biggest and most widely publicized li-ion battery production project in the Gigafactory in Nevada, but it’s far from the only project aiming to increase global supply of this important component for many industries, including the EV industry.

As we often discussed, Tesla is already producing battery packs at the Gigafactory, but that’s only the beginning. In October 2015, the company moved the Tesla Energy production line from its Fremont factory to the ‘Gigafactory 1‘ project in Nevada. Tesla has since been ramping up for volume production to start in early 2016.
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Tesla confirmed achieving a 238 units per week production rate for the Model X during the last week of December. The company produced just over 500 Model X’s in 2015, which represents about half of the ~1,000 US reservation backlog of limited-edition ‘Signature Model X’.

If the company maintained its production rate during the past two weeks, it means the company is starting the production of its regular production Model X, and the first report of a production Model X reservation holder having his car entering production is corroborating the assumption.
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We were kind of disappointed to learn yesterday that Faraday Future’s first big reveal is a concept race car, which will act as a “test bed” for the company’s technology, and not an early prototype of FF’s first production car.

But it looks like the company released a subtle glimpse of its first production car in the release video of its FFZERO1 concept.
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In his latest letter to the Lit Motors community, CEO Daniel Kim, who recently suffered from a severe motorcycle accident and is now recovering from a hip replacement, says the company is making progress on its electric self-balancing motorcycle, but they are still not ready to offer a timeline to production.
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The first spy shots of the production version of the 2017 all-electric Chevy Bolt were released today via SpiedBilde and Autoblog. First impression is that the production version is quite significantly different from the concept car (as usual) unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show earlier this year. It seems to take more design queues from the Volt.
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Tesla has already begun production at their $5 billion battery factory, according to the company’s third quarter 2015 shareholder letter. In October, production of Tesla’s Powerpacks and Powerwalls moved from Fremont to an automated assembly line at the Gigafactory.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is in China this week to personally oversee the release of the Autopilot in the country. Speaking at the Tsinghua University earlier today, he said that the company will have production capacity in the country within 2 years according to a Chinese report. The timeline matches the company’s planned release of its mass market $35,000 car, the Model 3.
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When Google originally showcased the newer low-speed “cute-mobile” self-driving car, it mentioned a goal of having about 100 of them on the road for testing within a couple years. Now, as the company is bringing its low-speed electric prototypes to Austin a year later, Sarah Hunter, head of policy for Google [X], has revealed that the company is expanding production of the cars (via The Guardian). Hunter says that Google is now producing at least a “few hundred” and hints at a potential future of mass-production…
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