Tesla held its Q1 earnings call this morning Australian time with most expecting it to be quite a difficult one for the company after recent rumours of Tesla cancelling its affordable EV.
The company’s CEO, Elon Musk, in his opening remarks, surprised everyone by disproving these rumours and announcing that the company is fast-tracking its affordable EV program which will help the company get to 3 million units of annual sales.
“In terms of the new product road map, there’s been a lot of talk about our upcoming vehicle line in the next… in the past several weeks,” he said.
“We’ve updated our future vehicle lineup to accelerate the launch of new models, previously mentioned start of production in the second half of 2025. So, we expect it to be more like the early 2025, if not late this year.”
The most surprising part of the announcement was that the affordable model will be utilising the existing Model 3 and Model Y production lines while utilising parts of the engineering from its upcoming models.
Musk explained this by stating: “These new vehicles, including more affordable models, will use aspects of the next-generation platform as well as aspects of our current platforms, and we’ll be able to produce on the same manufacturing lines as our current vehicle lineup.”
Bringing the future platform forward will help the company bring those eventual sales into 2025.
That ultimately will set the company’s sales target to potentially 3 million vehicles in 2025 with Musk saying: “We think this should allow us to get to over 3 million vehicles of capacity when realized to the full extent.”
This was re-iterated in Tesla’s shareholder deck for Q1 earnings, which said that despite a fall in first quarter deliveries, as well as revenue and earnings, it will be able to lift production but more than 50 per cent over 2023 production before investing in new manufacturing lines.”
Tesla also confirmed that the Cybertruck production has ramped up to 1,000 units a week. Tesla has previously mentioned that they would like to get to an annual rate of 250,000 units which would mean getting up to 5,000 units per week.
With the entire automotive industry facing challenges, sales are sliding for many brands. The company expects the second quarter to see an improvement in sales for the leading all-electric company with Musk saying: “We think Q2 will be a lot better.”
The announcement of the new affordable models from Tesla has helped provide investors with more confidence in the company and is positive news for the adoption of EVs in the medium to long term.
Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.