It is likely because Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk supported the candidacy of Hillary Clinton during the last US presidential elections that a top propagandist of US president-elect Donald Trump has launched a campaign against the American electric carmaker.
The same PR specialist also said that Tesla Model 3, the company’s first mass-produced electric vehicle would not make it to the market until the end of 2018 which is actually more than a year of push-back from Tesla’s projection of a 2017 release date, reports Electrek.
This assessment seems consistent with a recent report from Morgan Stanley who also stated that the Tesla Model 3 might not arrive until the very end of 2018.
Tesla Motors has yet to comment on the allegations of the conservative public relations specialist from the Trump camp and the report from Morgan Stanley but the company is officially closing in on its acquisition of SolarCity.
It has also picked up a HoloLens designer as its second augmented reality related hire from Microsoft.
The factories of the future
In the recent annual shareholders meeting of Tesla Motors Corporation, Elon Musk confirmed that the company is putting a lot of effort into designing the factories of the future.
He explained that by focusing on the physics-first principles, the production capacity can be increased exponentially if the focus is on building the machines that build the machine.
Musk says the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada is being designed like a giant supercomputer rather than a conventional manufacturing facility.
Tesla is currently building Model S and Model X cars at its Fremont factory at the rate of about 2,200 a week or 110,000 a year. Musk says he expects Tesla to build 500,000 Model 3 cars a year. 110,000 plus 500,000 would exceed that theoretical maximum capacity for the Fremont factory, reports Clean Technica.
Not a know-it-all
Unlike incoming US President Donald Trump, Musk does not pretend to know all the answers. He freely admits the Model S was designed with little thought about how to actually manufacture it.
The Model X was supposed to be built on the Model S chassis, but the car wound up having almost 80% new parts, making it impossible to manufacture the SUV on the same assembly line as the sedan.
He says Tesla learned from its mistakes and that for the Model 3 the focus was on ease of manufacture from Day One.
But production could improve for the Tesla Model 3 because of several key innovations. One innovation is the very large rear window extending forward to the ‘B’ pillar, eliminating the structural beam above the heads of rear-seat passengers.
This innovation increases rear seat headroom and at the same time reduces the complexity of the design. The big Tesla Model 3 rear window does something else, too. It creates a great big hole in the Model 3 design.
A hole very conveniently located to allow robots an unobstructed reach into the Model 3 interior for installing carpets, wiring harnesses, sensors, seats, and the like.
Incidentally, Tesla Motors Corporation shall reportedly include in the current production of its Model 3 sedan a new hardware that shall enable the vehicle to be fully autonomous.
It was Tesla CEO Elon Musk who officially made the statement last month but the hardware still does not mean that the Model 3 will become completely autonomous when they roll out in the American motoring market in the second half of next year.
The company clarified that the hardware is just a prelude to the possibility of enabling the Model 3 to become fully autonomous.
Musk explained that the foundation has been laid for fully autonomous driving on the upcoming Model 3, describing it as twice as safe as a human or maybe even better.
He said that the Model 3 shall have eight surround cameras that provide 360 degrees of visions at up to 250 meters of range. The system shall also include 12 ultrasonic sensors as well as an improve forward-facing radar that is capable of functioning even under extreme weather conditions.