Photo: Tesla Motors
It seems like a pretty distant memory now, but back in late 2017, Tesla was going through what its CEO described as "production hell". The Model 3 was the car that could make or break the company, and it looks like we came very close to the latter during that time.
It's one thing being a niche, boutique EV manufacturer, and a completely different one to operate several plants on different continents. However, if your goal is to rid humanity of its dependency on fossil fuels, you won't be able to do it with low volumes.
That's why the switch from very expensive cars to much more affordable ones wasn't so much an option as actually a condition for Tesla. The company fell short of reaching its targets in terms of annual global sales - according to 2016 Musk, Tesla was supposed to sell 500,000 units by 2018.
With 367,500 EVs delivered in 2019, it looks like Tesla won't be able to hit the half-a-million milestone earlier than 2020. However, if the "$25,000 model" planned over the following years turns out to be more than just smoke and mirrors - and the EV market continues to expand - there's no reason why Tesla won't be able to sell double or triple that.
According to Musk, though, we were only a month away from having a very different conversation now. Asked about that period when the focus was on bringing the Model 3 to mass production and how close the company was to bankruptcy, Musk tweeted: "Closest we got was about a month. The Model 3 ramp was extreme stress & pain for a long time — from mid-2017 to mid-2019. Production & logistics hell."
If you remember, it was around that time when news of Musk skipping sleep and battling with the depression that type of habit usually brings started to emerge, which we have no reason to doubt. The CEO doesn't say exactly when during those two years they were this close to total collapse, but it's a good opportunity to imagine the ripples that such an event would have sent throughout the automotive industry. We're glad it didn't happen, but we'd be lying if we said we weren't curious to know what would have happened. Our guess would be that ten or twenty years from now, people would be watching "Who Killed the Electric Car, the Sequel".
That's why the switch from very expensive cars to much more affordable ones wasn't so much an option as actually a condition for Tesla. The company fell short of reaching its targets in terms of annual global sales - according to 2016 Musk, Tesla was supposed to sell 500,000 units by 2018.
With 367,500 EVs delivered in 2019, it looks like Tesla won't be able to hit the half-a-million milestone earlier than 2020. However, if the "$25,000 model" planned over the following years turns out to be more than just smoke and mirrors - and the EV market continues to expand - there's no reason why Tesla won't be able to sell double or triple that.
According to Musk, though, we were only a month away from having a very different conversation now. Asked about that period when the focus was on bringing the Model 3 to mass production and how close the company was to bankruptcy, Musk tweeted: "Closest we got was about a month. The Model 3 ramp was extreme stress & pain for a long time — from mid-2017 to mid-2019. Production & logistics hell."
If you remember, it was around that time when news of Musk skipping sleep and battling with the depression that type of habit usually brings started to emerge, which we have no reason to doubt. The CEO doesn't say exactly when during those two years they were this close to total collapse, but it's a good opportunity to imagine the ripples that such an event would have sent throughout the automotive industry. We're glad it didn't happen, but we'd be lying if we said we weren't curious to know what would have happened. Our guess would be that ten or twenty years from now, people would be watching "Who Killed the Electric Car, the Sequel".
Closest we got was about a month. The Model 3 ramp was extreme stress & pain for a long time — from mid 2017 to mid 2019. Production & logistics hell.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 3, 2020
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