#ElonMusk

Footage of Tesla’s electric semi truck has been circulating around the internet all month — proving the vehicle is more tangible than some might have previously argued. There appears to be at least two test platforms milling around California right now, and one of them is laying rubber on low-speed industrial roads.

While we’re not sure of the logistical merits of an electric semi offering blisteringly fast cab-only acceleration, Tesla’s truck certainly looks capable of trouncing your average bobtailed hauler. There’s even video evidence to back up this claim. However, fleet managers won’t give a rat’s ass about this, as it has nothing to do with optimizing efficiency.

Since beginning production of the Model 3 last summer, Tesla has dialed back production targets like a thermostat in the springtime. The electric automaker’s first goal of 5,000 units per week by the end of the year passed as the champagne corks flew on New Year’s Eve, but by that time Tesla had already pushed it back to the end of Q1 2018.

Amid troubles on the assembly line, that target eventually moved to the end of the second quarter of this year, a goal that still stands.

Just how many Model 3s is Tesla cranking out these days? The company only reports deliveries on a quarterly basis, making it hard to get a firm read on the company’s exact output. One publication hopes to change that.

Tesla claims it’s closing in on its goal to produce 2,500 Model 3 sedans a week, even though the original deadline for that target is a few months past. However, a problem remains. Despite having all the tooling needed to hit its mark, some of the essential components are still in Germany when they should be in the United States.

While the automaker still claims it can reach 2,500 unit per week by the end of March, the new automated system for module production needs to be shipped from Grohmann Automation in Dausfeld, Germany, to the company’s Gigafactory, located outside Reno, Nevada. That’s a long distance to ship a lot of hardware in roughly a month’s time, leaving many wondering if Tesla is about to break another promise to investors.

Tesla Motors has announced that its CEO, Elon Musk, won’t be paid unless its already high stock valuation blasts into the stratosphere. The executive’s compensation is now tied to a dozen operational milestones. The first of these requires bringing the company’s current market cap to $100 billion, followed by 11 more set at $50 billion increments.

Agreeing to the program, Musk now has to stay with Tesla until 2028 as both its executive chair and product officer. While this does allow him to bring in another CEO sometime in the future, the company is likely hoping to dispel any speculation that he would abandon the position. It’s good to see Musk putting some serious skin into the game but, as a multi-billionaire, his not being paid unless Tesla’s stock valuation climbs isn’t the biggest threat to his financial security.

To hear Tesla explain it, the fourth quarter of 2017 was a boffo month for the company, with record deliveries and a new product that’s really hitting its stride.

It’s true that 1,550 customers took delivery of a Model 3 in the past three months, after the previous quarter saw just 220 of the lower-priced electric sedans roll into driveways. Overall deliveries rose 9 percent from Q3, for a tally of 29,870 vehicles. It sounds good, but the company, like before, still isn’t making enough Model 3s.

As it continues working through supply and assembly line issues, Tesla has pushed back its goal for 5,000-vehicle-a-week Model 3 production for the second time.

While The Truth About Cars has occasionally been accused for having it in for Tesla, the honest-to-god-truth is that we just possess a severe aversion to unbridled hype. Autonomous cars have made a lot of progress in the last few years, but there’s something about the way manufacturers talk about them that makes us want to say, “Interesting, but we’ll believe it when we see it.”

Automakers love making grandiose claims and Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk may be the prince of hyperbolic statements and lofty promises. He should be commended for delivering on many of them. Still, though there have been many occasions where the other shoe dropped and it was our job to report it. We’re having to do that again, now that Tesla has missed its initial deadline to dazzle the world with an autonomous cross-country road trip.

Tesla Motors or, more accurately, company CEO Elon Musk has hinted at the prospect of an electric pickup for quite some time. But neither the automaker nor the CEO ever issued any kind of concrete guarantee on it, even after other manufacturers had already beaten it to the punch.

However, Musk is now officially promising the pickup will be made immediately after the Model Y crossover arrives sometime between 2019 and 2020. Of course, he also promised that Model 3 deliveries would hit its stride before the end of this year. So let’s consider this more of an assurance that Tesla will produce the electric truck and not so much an indication of when you might see one on public roads.

American investment manager and short-seller extraordinaire Jim Chanos claims Tesla is “headed for a brick wall.” Having deemed the automaker as structurally unprofitable, Chanos said, “Three years ago, this company was supposed to be making money [today]. And now, it’s supposed to be making money by 2020. I’m guessing by 2019, we’ll hear about 2025.”

However, while Tesla has taken on massive amounts of debt to ensure its evolution as company, investors haven’t seemed to mind. Its stock price has climbed from $33 a share in 2013 to almost $380 in September of 2017. As a short-seller, Chanos says he’s lost money on the company in the past since the stock price never seems to go down, and that’s what he finds the most alarming.

“Nobody is buying Tesla stock based upon the current business,” he said. “It’s all based on the future and the hope for half-a-million to a million Model 3s per year.”

Unless you were living under a rock or on the moon late last week, you know Tesla introduced not one but two concepts on Thursday night — a Class 8 semi truck and a kinda-sorta-maybe Roadster (is it a roadster or a targa? It’ll only cost you a quarter mil to find out).

Since then, many corners of the internet have been yammering about the feasibility of Tesla’s plans, not to mention the wisdom of taking eyes off the very important ball that is the Model 3 in favor of two models that likely won’t appear until the next decade.

The Roadster’s back. Tell a friend.

Not that you’ll need to, of course. Elon Musk and Company seemingly pulled off the impossible last night in California, blowing up the internets by upstaging Tesla’s own semi truck reveal with a carefully choreographed “one more thing” moment.

Patience, as we’ve been told, is a virtue. Therefore, the most virtuous individuals occupying the ball of mud we call Earth must be the Tesla faithful currently awaiting their pre-ordered Model 3 sedans. The speed of the vehicle’s launch has been sedate, to say the least. Tesla Motors finds itself plagued by production bottlenecks, which hasn’t helped the already long wait times facing those who dropped a sizable wad of bills just for the privilege of eventually owning its latest model.

However, the lengthy intermission between launch and ownership doesn’t appear to be diminishing their love for the company — a testament to the brand’s difficult-to-tarnish image. Fans of the automaker seem content to wait it out in tranquility like Siddhartha Gautama under the tree of enlightenment.

Unbothered by the constraints of space and time, Elon Musk took to Twitter yesterday, breathlessly announcing a press conference for Thursday. Is the call’s topic set to address Model 3 production troubles? Or, perhaps, provide some insight into the supply chain woes at the Gigafactory? No, dear reader, nothing so mundane.

It’s to announce the Tesla semi truck, which is surely the most urgent topic and best use of resources at Tesla these days.

Never has the air of breathless futurism surrounding Tesla taken such a hit. Following a revealing earning report and numerous reports of continuing production bottlenecks, this week wasn’t a good one for either Tesla shareholders or Model 3 reservation holders.

The electric automaker pushed back its 5,000-vehicle-per-week goal to the end of the first-quarter of 2018, rather than the end of this year. Its 10,000-vehicles-per-week goal remains a question mark. Tesla also announced a decrease in Model S and X production to bolster resources for Model 3 builds. In reporting a quarterly loss of $619 million, Tesla made it clear it’s burning through piles of cash in an attempt to smooth out production line hurdles.

Now, a new report sheds light on the frenetic activity occurring inside its Fremont, California factory. One of the claims certainly won’t soothe those worried about a long-standing Tesla concern: build quality.

Lately, we’ve been guilty of the same behavior as a lot of other well-rounded and objective automotive publications — bashing Tesla Motors. It hasn’t been done maliciously, but we’d be lying if we said the divisive hype and hate surrounding the company didn’t bother us. However, since the summer launch of the Model 3, a slew of happenings at Tesla have have raised unanswered questions.

The biggest question surrounds the cause of the company’s rather severe production delays. Tesla also fired hundreds of employees this month, without any clear answer as to why, and seems to have shelved a cross-country trip aimed at highlighting the progress made with its Autopilot driver assistance platform.

None of this would be quite so noteworthy if its stock valuation wasn’t still stratospherically high and CEO Elon Musk hadn’t publicly promised so much — but that isn’t the reality we’re living in. Now, with the company reporting its third quarter earnings on Wednesday evening, we’re hoping to get some clarity on what exactly is happening in Fremont, California.

We’ve debated Tesla Motors’ production ramp-up in the past, coming to the obvious conclusion that the automaker has a long road ahead of it before its proposed volume goals can be reached. The company knows this and Elon Musk has repeatedly said scaling up Tesla’s vehicle assembly will be akin to a kind of “production hell.”

However, we haven’t done a comparative analysis to extrapolate just how ambitious Tesla’s targets truly are. Half a million vehicles by next year is a lot of annual production for any fledgling automaker. We assumed the company would do its best and we’d see how close it came to the bar at a later date. But, with the Model 3 production getting off to an incredibly slow start, it’s worth looking at how far Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, will have to climb to achieve the desired numbers.

It isn’t looking particularly good in the short term.