On one hand, Tesla’s fierce competitor Faraday Future has shared with us the details of its first production electric car whereas the Musk-led company has some not-so-exciting news to convey. The electric car maker has today detailed its fourth quarter production and sales figures, which saw a massive uptick in the former as compared to the latter.
During the start of 2016, founder and CEO Musk had touted that his company is steadily increasing production capacity — which will be true once the Gigafactory comes into action — and will deliver 80,000 vehicles in 2016. But the company has fallen short of its goal and claims it has been the case due to ‘short-term production challenges starting at the end of October’ due to its transition towards the integration of full hardware assets for self-driving capabilities.
Continuing to talk about the same, the official statement reads,
We were ultimately able to recover and hit our production goal, but the delay in production resulted in challenges that impacted quarterly deliveries, including, among other things, cars missing shipping cutoffs for Europe and Asia.
In the fourth quarter figures shared by Tesla, the company produced 24,882 vehicles and managed to sell approximately 22,200 vehicles in the 3-month period from October to December. The sales figure for the said quarter includes 12,700 Model S and 9,500 Model X deliveries, which could’ve been considerably more if the company didn’t have to face delays due to hardware changes. Nearly 2,750 vehicles missed out on being accounted for deliveries in the fourth quarter, reads the blog post.
Nearly 2,750 Tesla cars missed out on being accounted for deliveries in the fourth quarter due to ‘last-minute delays in transport or because the customer was unable to physically take delivery,’ reads the blog post. The company decided not to count these vehicles as sold even when the customer had paid for the same. It further mentions that more than 6,450 vehicles are still in transit and their deliveries will be counted toward the first quarter of 2017.
As for the overall growth in production and sales figures, Tesla, as mentioned above, managed to recover from the challenges and complete its production goal. It managed to manufacture 3,992 more vehicles, which accounts for a 64 percent increase from 2015. The demand for the electric vehicles – both models – also increased by 52 percent in the said quarter as compared to the corresponding one last year. It was also 24 percent higher the Tesla’s record quarter i.e Q3 2016.
Even after emphasising the numbers multiple times in the last year, not meeting its delivery goal spells bad news for Tesla. The company has repeatedly missed its product deadlines with most of its Models. Addition of the new hardware could be seen as a genuine challenge for this quarter but the sales for the Model S and X are tanking with no info on the budget Model 3.
