Tesla Aiming for an Early Arrival at 500,000 Vehicles

Tesla Model 3 (Credit: © Tesla)

Tesla is not a company known for its timeliness. In fact, it is best known for missing deadlines and ticking customers off in the process. Today, the automaker is adjusting yet another timeline, but oddly enough, it is actually pushing its deadline to an earlier date. The deadline in question is its goal of hitting 500,000 vehicles produced.

In Tesla’s latest earnings call, the automaker announced that it plans to push its timeframe to reach 500,000 vehicles up from 2020 to 2018. While that may seem like a lofty goal, keep in mind that the Model 3 has well over 300,000 preorders on the books now, so there is certainly enough demand to reach this goal. The real challenge will be having the bandwidth and resources needed to produce half a million vehicles by 2018.

Of the 300,000 Model 3 preorders, Tesla plans to have 200,000 of them produced and shipped by the end of 2018. While that sounds well and good, Tesla has been quite open with the fact that it doubts it’ll hit the Model 3’s July 1st, 2017 production kickoff date. If it can’t hit this date, then there is little hope for its 200,000-units-produced goal by the end of 2017 and even less of a chance of hitting 500,000 units sold by 2018.

I am not too sure what Elon Musk’s intentions are with moving its goal date up two years, but it seems like another potentially unfulfillable promise to me. We’ll bring you updates along the way, so stay tuned.