With hundreds of thousands of customers awaiting the hotly anticipated Model 3, Tesla was never expected to keep up with demand right off the bat. The company is a little further behind than expected, however, with its Q3 production numbers falling well short of its expectations.
Tesla released its quarterly vehicle production numbers on Monday and was quick to point out that it was its best quarter ever for the Model S and Model X deliveries, with 14,065 and 11,865 delivered, respectively.
This is up 4.5 percent for those vehicles on Q3 last year, the company's previous best quarter, and a 17.7 percent increase over Q2 this year. All up, the company expects to deliver around 100,000 of those vehicles in 2017, a 31 percent increase on its 2016 effort.
But there's less reason to celebrate when it comes to Tesla's debut mass market sedan. More than 325,000 had signed up to buy the Model 3 within the first week of pre-orders opening last year, and the company had planned to build 100 units in August, more than 1,500 in September and then be pumping out more than 20,000 a month by December.
The company managed 260 Model 3s in Q3, with 220 of those delivered. It attributes the low output to production bottlenecks and says that a handful of its manufacturing subsystems at its California car plant and Nevada Gigafactory have taken longer to activate than expected.
It also says that there are no fundamental issues with production or the supply chain of the Model 3, and that it understands the problems and will address them in the near-term.
Source: Tesla