So last night Tesla did their whole media circus thing at the Fremont factory, handed the keys to the first 30 Model 3s to actual customers, who happen to also mostly be Tesla employees, because of course they are. I watched the livestream instead of doing literally anything more productive with my Friday night, which tells you something about where my priorities sit in 2017.
Here's the number that actually stuck with me though, and it's not the $35,000 base price everyone's been repeating for two years now like a magic incantation. It's that Musk stood up there, grinning, and told a room full of cameras that Tesla is about to enter "production hell" for the next six to nine months. His words, not mine. He said it more than once, actually, like he wanted to make sure it landed. Ramping from 30 cars this week to 100 by end of August, 1,500 by September, and — this is the part that made me laugh into my coffee — 20,000 a month by December.
Twenty thousand a month. By December. Five months from now.
I dont think anyone in that room, employees included, actually believes that timeline holds, and I say that as someone who wants an electric car in my driveway eventually and has been half-following this saga since the reservations opened back in April 2016. Remember that? People slept outside Tesla stores to put down a fully refundable $1,000 deposit on a car they hadnt seen, based on a stage prop and a promise. There were something like 373,000 of those deposits within the first week. Ive got a friend, Dev, who was in that line at the Century City store, and he still doesnt have a car. Wont for a while yet, either. Tesla's openly said the reservation queue is going to take well into 2018 to clear for anyone who isnt an employee or didnt order the priciest configuration first.
That's the bit that bugs me a little, honestly. Not the wait itself, waits happen with new products, but the framing. Last nights event was staged as a triumphant handover moment, confetti-adjacent energy, Musk doing his usual keynote-guy bit where he undersells nothing and oversells everything in the same breath. And then in practically the same sentence he's telling you to expect months of chaos on the line. Which is candid of him, I'll give him that: companies dont usually stand up in front of the press and preemptively warn you theyre going to screw up. But it's also a company that has, by its own CEO's admission, never hit a production target on time. The Model X launch delays are not ancient history. That was 2015 into 2016.
What I keep coming back to is how different the Model 3 rollout philosophy is from literally everything else Tesla's built. The S and the X were low-volume, high-margin, sell-to-people-who-can-absorb-a-delay-without-blinking cars. The 3 is supposed to be the volume play, the one that actually has to work like a normal car company's assembly line, at automotive-industry scale, not boutique scale. Going from "we hand-built 30 of these very carefully with executives standing around" to "we're stamping out 20,000 identical units a month with the same quality" is an enormous jump, and everyone covering this launch today is writing it up like the hard part's already done because thirty cars rolled off a stage. The hard part hasnt started yet. The hard part is exactly the six to nine months Musk just told us to brace for.
I'll say this much in Tesla's favor: at least he's naming it instead of pretending the ramp will be smooth, which is more than I can say for basically every other car company's rollout messaging Ive ever sat through. Doesnt mean I'm holding my breath for December, though. If you put a reservation in back in 2016 like Dev did, settle in. You're probably a 2018 story, not a 2017 one, no matter what the confetti last night wants you to believe.