Quote:
Originally Posted by JSH
Building depends on Tesla having the money for the new production tools and assembly line at the Gigafactory. If they spend almost all theie remaking cash they can likely do it.
Can they do it on schedule? All past experience says no. Musk says production cars will be available 4th quarter 2020. Those will likely be a few dozen preproduction car. Early to mid 2021 is more likely for production at any scale. By then the Model 3 design will be 5 years old.
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I could see them spending most of their remaining cash, but I don't see it as a negative. Going from building a few thousand cars per year (2012) to building 80k+ cars/year (2016) required ~$4.1 billion in capex from 2013 through 2016.
Since the end of 2016, the Gigafactory went from producing no cells to producing more than the rest of the world combined for EVs, and Tesla went from building 80k+ cars/year (2016) to building 80k+ cars/quarter (18Q4), which required about $5.5 billion in capex from 2017 through 2018.
If the Model Y is popular enough, I could see Tesla increasing battery and vehicle production by another factor of two to four and needing another $5-7+ billion over two to four years to do so. If the Y is only as popular as the 3, then their capex will be likely be much less.