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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I missed it in the article but how many does Tesla need to make per day to meet it's goals?

They are making 1,000 per week now (52k in a year at current rate) and have 500k reservations in line with $1,000 deposits?

So they need an order of magnitude increase in rate to fulfill the reservations in a year?

I didn't know much about car numbers and it seems about 387k Toyota Camrys were sold in 2017 for reference.

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The graphs show a clearly exponential grow rate. No idea how long it will keep growing and when it'll start to plateau, but it does not seem to be going to suddenly, exactly this month stop growing. If they keep it like this apparent 10-20% increased production/week in 12 months they will be producing 3000-9000 cars/week.

So yeah, IF (big if) they can keep it growing at the same exponential rate it'd take around 65-34 weeks [0][1] to deliver 500k cars from now with 10% and 20% growth rates respectively:

[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1+%2B+1.2+%5E+x)+*+10...

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1+%2B+1.2+%5E+x)+*+10...

exponential growth rates in industrial production are HIGHLY unlikely.

At best you will have a step function as additional assembly lines come on.

OR you will have a max production ability, with various factors inhibiting that production ability such as part issues, failures, faults and so on.

So either the plant is not at full capacity, and there are production issues.

OR the plants are at full capacity and more lines are being added.

(and you can have the worst of both)

It'll be an S-shape. Musk had images of it in his Model 3 presentation when he first mentioned 'production hell'.

They need to hit their immediate goal of 2,500/week by end of Q1 - see the last chart on that page. They didn't move this goal in the Q4 earnings call, which was surprising - but if this tracker is accurate the production curve seems to be on track.

They are also planning to bring in a fully automated assembly line being shipped from Europe, in March. Assuming nothing goes wrong there it is supposed to accelerate production even more.

> assuming nothing goes wrong

Yeah, hopefully they didn't make that assumption... Can't imagine debugging a whole assembly line (even a virtual one in a game like factorio is hell at the beginning)

Except this one was already build and tested in Germany iirc. It should be debugged and taken apart into modular pieces and sent to Tesla. I assume installing these modules should be easier than debugging an assembly line in factorio ;)

Don't underestimate the innate human ability to fuck up what appears to be a simple job :). There will be delays and deviation from a best case schedule.

From memory it's not unreasonable to expect a single production line to be turning out 5-6000 cars a week.

well, one goal is 5K/week by July, so 715/day?

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