More than 400,000 customers have already pre-booked the car paying USD 1,000 refundable payment
The production of Tesla’s first mass-market product Model 3 is delayed as the company is manufacturing unusually high ratio of flawed parts and vehicles, according to its employees. This has led to more rework and repairs that can be contained at its factory in Fremont, California.
More than 400,000 customers have already pre-booked the car paying USD 1,000 refundable payment. Resultantly, the company is under pressure to deliver on its promises.
Elon Musk, Tesla Motors CEO, in July 2017 had said that the company would be making 20,000 Model 3 by December last year, however, it downgraded the estimate to 2,500 a week till December and 5,000 per week by June this year.
According to CNBC, a current Tesla engineer estimated that 40 percent of the parts made or received at its Fremont factory require rework. The time and resources devoted to tending to these flawed parts is leading to the delay.
In order to deal with the flawed parts, the company also takes unusual steps of sending the parts to its remanufacturing facility in Lathrop, California, about 50 miles away, instead of fixing those parts “in-line”. Tesla also brings in teams of technicians and engineers from its service centres and remanufacturing lines to help with the repairs work, former and current employees told CNBC.
However, when contacted, Tesla outrightly rejected the claims. Our remanufacturing team does not ‘rework’ cars,” a spokesperson said. The company added that every vehicle constructed at Tesla go through more than 500 inspections and tests.
The company spokesperson said that most calibration made to the vehicles are minor which happen at the end of the line and are resolved in minutes. “Whereas before it took three shifts with considerable overtime to produce our target annual production of 100,000 Model S and X vehicles, now it can be done with only two shifts and minimal overtime,” the company added.
