stealthology
Member
That's legitimate rationale. This quarter we have a special situation with X. Apparently a range was given to account for variability of X deliveries. Here is a relevant note by Deutsche Bank issued on Dec 8th.
"The Model X is finally in series production. We saw half a dozen production Model X’s (customer vehicles) during a quick pass through the company’s final assembly area," Lache explained. "However, we suspect that Tesla may only achieve the lower half of its 15,000-17,000 unit production target for 4Q15. The bounds of this production forecast were driven by low and high forecasts for Model X production, with the low end including almost no Model X’s. During Tesla’s Q3 conference call, Tesla management suggested that achieving the high end of the range (15,000 Model S’s and 2,000 Model X’s) was predicated on ramping up to several hundred Model X’s per week by mid-November. Had Tesla achieved this target, we would have expected Model X to account for 1 of every 4 vehicles on the company’s final assembly line. At the time of our visit, we very roughly estimated that Model X accounted for roughly 1 of every 15 vehicles in final assembly."
Here is the source link.
So far it looks like X deliveries have been well below mid-point expectation. So maybe Tesla will barely make 15K deliveries, unless S deliveries were push even harder, which I believe is hard to evaluate.
I have no clue to the final answer, So I didn't answer the poll.
Based on my observations and reading around, it does seem like Tesla was pushing S deliveries harder-- if I recall, they had some specials going on.
Regarding the Deutsche Bank note you quoted above: I've listened to the Q3 call a number of times and I do not recall Tesla ever suggesting that they would produce 2,000 X's. Elon simply said he feels very confident in producing several hundred X's/week sometime next month (Dec). Right now, it doesn't look like that can happen, but I don't believe they planned on delivering more than several hundred or so anyway at the time of the Q3 call.
So it appears to be clear that some issue(s) came up with the X very recently (ie. missing bolt like on Bonnie's car), or dare I say.. there is a real door issue, however small it may be, and Elon knew about it during the Q3 call yet still wanted to get these few hundred out there for this year. I really hope ptsagcy's report had some false info. regarding the line being potentially shut down after all Sigs are delivered for tooling updates.
Maybe I'm just a little paranoid.