Tesla officially missed its goal of making 2,500 Model 3 vehicles a week at the end of the first financial quarter of this year, according to numbers announced today by the company. It will start the second quarter making just 2,000 Model 3s per week, but the company says it still believes it can get to a rate of 5,000 Model 3s per week at the midway point of the year.
CEO Elon Musk set these targets for the company late last year after it became apparent that Tesla was going to miss his original goal of making 5,000 Model 3s per week by the end of 2017. Along with being more affordable, the Model 3 represents Tesla’s first attempt at creating a car at mass-market scale. Production of it is eventually supposed to outpace that of the Model S or Model X, which Tesla currently makes at a much higher rate.
In total, Tesla has made 9,766 Model 3s since the beginning of 2018. A sizable chunk of those — 2,020 — came in the final week of the quarter, a figure that backs up recent reports that the company hurried to increase production to meet Musk’s target. Employees who work on the company’s other cars were reportedly asked in a recent internal memo to help increase production of the Model 3, which would help “prove a bunch of haters wrong.”
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