Elon Musk Is Pushing Tesla Hard

Tesla Motors Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk stunned investors in May when he announced that, thanks to phenomenal demand for the forthcoming Model 3, he was accelerating the company’s already aggressive build plan by two full years. Instead of increasing production to 500,000 cars in 2020, he wants to reach that level by 2018. To put that into perspective, Tesla delivered just 50,658 cars in 2015 and is projecting 80,000 this year. The company acknowledged the scale of the challenge in an Aug. 5 Securities and Exchange Commission filing: “We have no experience to date in manufacturing vehicles at the high volumes that we anticipate for Model 3, and to be successful, we will need to develop efficient, automated, low-cost manufacturing capabilities, processes, and supply chains necessary to support such volumes.”

Musk has referred to his factories—the auto plant in Fremont, Calif., and one for batteries going up in Reno, Nev.—as the “machine that builds the machine.” But with only 10 months to go before the self-imposed July 1, 2017, deadline for the start of Model 3 mass production, the machine that will build the new car is still being built. About 373,000 customers have already paid $1,000 to preorder the electric sedan.