It wasn’t a great week for Tesla last week. They were downgraded by both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on the same day, the company’s health official appeared to make up un-scientific excuses for the spread of Covid at the company’s California factories and the company started cancelling solar roof appointments that have been in place for the better part of the last 3 years.
Now, the problems appear to be extending to the Model Y. The company is reportedly having trouble scaling up production of its Model Y, according to a new report at Jalopnik.
Model Y production was the headline that was touted throughout the pandemic, several times, helping to keep Tesla’s stock price buoyant. With Tesla’s Fremont factory back on line and producing the carSUVwhatever the hell it is, it appears “not everything has gone to plan”.
CEO Elon Musk has apparently told employees that things aren’t going well and that he’d be walking the line to help fix issues, according to Bloomberg:
Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk told employees the electric-car maker is having issues boosting output of its new Model Y crossover and said he’ll be walking the assembly line on a weekly basis to troubleshoot production snafus.
“We are doing reasonably well with S, X and 3, but there are production and supply chain ramp challenges with Model Y, as is always the case for new products,” Musk wrote in an internal email sent Saturday and seen by Bloomberg News.
Of course, we’re not sure how Musk walking the floor of his production line is necessarily going to help. His rare visits to the factory floor have been described as hands-off and nerve wracking for employees. Even Jalopnik notes:
It’s always unclear whether Elon taking to the factory floors actually helps—it seems distracting, if nothing else, if you’re trying to focus on your work and the billionaire CEO of the company is wandering around observing things. But whether it’s a publicity stunt or not—or maybe Elon’s just bored—these factory tours always just seem to come and go, and production rolls on.
In addition to having scaling issues, other problems about the Model Y are starting to surface online. Perhaps due to the new body style of the Model Y, it once again appears that paint issues are abound:
?LOOOOL?
Tesla bans customers from buying a Tesla for 1 year if they return their #ModelY as customers report that the #ModelY has some, guess what…, #TeslaPaintIssues$tsla$tslaqhttps://t.co/dq9y1XLJ8mpic.twitter.com/ddgDYJ0fe8
— Teslamarkstheend (@Teslamarksthee1) June 13, 2020
We look forward to the Model Y hitting all of the stages of “hell” that Model 3 production had to endure: production hell, pricing hell, paint shop hell, gross margin hell and, eventually, simply running-out-of-demand hell.
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