Tesla will pause production of its Model 3 electric car for “planned downtime,” a Tesla spokesman confirmed to CBS News. The company said it is planned downtime, but the Model 3 has been famously plagued by production problems.
A Tesla spokesperson said the downtime is similar to a shutdown in February, which was “used to improve automation and systematically address bottlenecks in order to increase production rates.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk told Gayle King on “CBS This Morning” last week that the company is stuck in “production hell,” much of it relating to the Model 3, which is its first mid-priced, mass-produced electric car. But he said then that the production was back on track.
“I’m definitely under stress, so if I seem like I’m not under stress then I’m gonna be clear, I’m definitely under stress,” Musk told King.
In the past month, Tesla has issued a voluntary recall of 123,000 of its older Model S vehicles, dealt with a fatal crash of a vehicle equipped with its semi-autonomous driving system and suffered a downgrade of its credit status on Wall Street.
Tesla’s future is tied to the the Model 3. He said the production demands have been worse than expected, because they “got complacent about some of the things that we felt were our core technology….We put too much new technology into the Model 3 all at once. This — this should have been staged.”
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