webb14leafs said:
cwerdna said:
500K vehicles per year rate within 6 months? Doubtful. Within a year? Maybe.
Getting to 1 million vehicles/year in 3 years? From now or 4 years from now? In 3 years, highly unlikely. They'd have to build at some other plant somewhere else. The Fremont plant doesn't have the production capacity for 1 million/year. Ramping up production isn't just a matter of turning a knob to 10 or 11.
Let's revisit where they are on your claims at the 1 year mark from now and 3 (or 4?) years from now.
I would be happy to revisit this in the future, and I'm open to being wrong about all of these predictions. I'm not an expert. I'm just an investor.
The timeline for building (or adding on) a new plant is less than 3 years. It took VW right around 2.5 years to add a new production facility to the Passat plant in Chattanooga to build the Atlas, and they didn't have the fervent market that Tesla does. This could be even quicker if it was just adding a new line of the same platform, which is what the model Y is supposed to be.
Where are these new assembly plant(s) going to be built? Has Tesla started on that journey? What is their expected production capacity?
Per articles like http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/local/story/2015/oct/30/vw-pledges-chattanoogexpansion-suv/333283/ give figures like
The recent $900 million expansion opened room for Atlas production, lifting the assembly capacity to 250,000 vehicles per year from 150,000. This averages out to full production capability of almost 21,000 vehicles each month.
http://www.volkswagengroupofamerica.com/chattanooga-facts mentions
05/18/2017 – First Customer Atlas Delivered
12/14/2016 – 2018 Atlas Start of Production
I found figures like http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/volkswagen/volkswagen-atlas/ that concur w/that timeline. https://media.vw.com/releases/966 mentions 27,119 Atlases were sold in the US in 2017.
AFAIK, Tesla hasn't even produced 500K vehicles since inception. The Fremont plant only had capacity for 500K units/year when it was NUMMI.
VW Group is one of the largest automakers in the world by sales and production, producing over 10 million vehicles/year.
Fanboy sites like https://electrek.co/2017/06/06/tesla-new-factory-gigafactories/ state
Tesla is trying to expand the facility and public transit options have been added, but if Model Y is expected to sell as many or more units than the Model 3 (as Musk claimed in today’s speech), then Tesla will need another facility, likely about as big as the Fremont plant, just to meet Model Y demand.
It takes more than just putting up a building. Equipment needs to be purchased and installed. Equipment needs to be set up and programmed. If processes exist already, they need to be replicated at the new plant. Workers needs to be hired and trained. Suppliers must also up capacity and there's everything that goes on w/maintaining a supply chain. Many test vehicles need to be built first, validated and so on.
Tesla itself reaching 1 million vehicles/year production capacity within 3 years sounds like fantasy-land "magical thinking" to me. Even if it were 4 years, that sounds like a stretch. They'd need to have another plant or two online and possibly outsource/use a contract manufacturer (e.g. Valmet or Magna).