Tesla shuts down Model 3 production for up to five days
Embattled Tesla has temporarily shut down the assembly line for the Model 3, the electric sedan widely seen as critical to the success of the Palo Alto company.
Production of the Model 3 has been plagued by delays, with CEO Elon Musk forced twice to announce the firm would not hit manufacturing targets.
Now, Tesla has shut down the Model 3 assembly line at its Fremont factory.
The pause in production of the car will last four to five days, and came “without warning,” employees reportedly told Buzzfeed.
A Tesla spokesperson said Model 3 production included “periods of planned downtime” at the Fremont plant and its Nevada battery factory.
“These periods are used to improve automation and systematically address bottlenecks in order to increase production rates,” the spokesperson said.
“This is not unusual and is in fact common in production ramps like this.”
On Friday, Musk had tweeted that “excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake.”
Musk added, “Humans are underrated.”
The Model 3 starts at $35,000, but only premium-priced versions are currently in production, according to the company. Tesla says nearly a half million pre-orders have been made for the Model 3.
Model 3 production had been suspended for a week in February, with the company providing the same comments about “planned downtime” to “improve automation and systematically address bottlenecks in order to increase production rates,” according to a Bloomberg report in March.
On April 3, Tesla issued a press release saying “several short factory shutdowns to upgrade equipment” had helped it double the weekly Model 3 production rate for the first quarter of this year. Although the company said it had increased Model 3 production “exponentially” in the quarter, the 9,766 cars produced represented a much slower output than the 5,000 per week it had promised to make by the end of December, then by the end of March, and now by the end of June.
While the firm has taken considerable heat over Model 3 production delays, it is also facing other significant problems that have led to public spats with federal regulators and an investigative journalism organization.
The company is feuding with the National Transportation Safety Board over a fatal Model X crash on Highway 101 in Mountain View on March 23 that involved the controversial “Autopilot” system that includes automated-driving features.
And on Monday, the Center for Investigative Reporting published a report alleging that Tesla had “failed to report some of its serious (workplace) injuries on legally mandated reports, making the company’s injury numbers look better than they actually are.”
In a venomous blog post, Tesla denied the claims.
“What they portray as investigative journalism is in fact an ideologically motivated attack by an extremist organization working directly with union supporters to create a calculated disinformation campaign against Tesla,” the company said Monday.
Adding to the firm’s troubles was a March recall of 123,000 Model S sedans, to fix a power-assisted steering problem related to bolts that may corrode.