Tesla gears up from production hell to logistical nightmare

The Driven

It seems that electric car maker Tesla has gone from the “production hell” lamented last year by CEO and founder Elon Musk to some sort of delivery hell as the logistical challenge of expanding into Europe and China resulted in a worse than expected loss for the first quarter of 2019.

Tesla only last year posted its first profitable quarter, after spending many months overcoming the challenges of ramping up assembly of the now best selling Model 3 in what the CEO referred to as “production hell”.

In this latest quarter, that challenge turned into the delivery of the Model 3 to customers in Europe and China, and Musk described it as one of the most complicated quarters in the company’s history.

He noted that the rapid increase in overseas volume strained the company’s logistics operations, resulting in half of our global deliveries occurring in the final 10 days of the first quarter.

“That is insane,” Musk said, noting that everyone from sales, engineering, legal and HR staff had been involved in helping make the deliveries. “This was the most difficult logistics I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen some tough ones.”

Tesla is promising that April will see its biggest delivery month on record as the logistics bottlenecks are unwound, and it is now looking to the next generation of EVs including the Model Y (an SUV), and the big Tesla Semi, the electric truck that is already making deliveries.

To read the full story on RenewEconomy’s electric vehicle dedicated site, The Driven, click here…