Electric car maker Tesla Inc has delivered on its chief executive’s promise to build a lower-priced car at a rate of 5,000 per week by the end of last month.
CEO Elon Musk on Sunday sent an e-mail to employees praising them for producing 5,000 Model 3s, a compact car that is designed to shift Tesla from a niche manufacturer to a mainstream automaker.
Musk said the company had cranked out a combined 2,000 of Model S sedans and Model X sport-utility vehicles, bringing overall production to a record 7,000 for the week.
“We did it!” Musk wrote. “What an incredible job by an amazing team.”
The e-mail was reported by the Web site Electrek, and the company confirmed its authenticity.
Last summer, when the first Model 3s began rolling off the assembly line, Musk promised to build 5,000 per week by December and 10,000 per week this year.
Model 3 sales are critical to Tesla’s future. The company has never posted a full-year profit, and it burned through more than US$1 billion in cash in the first quarter. Wall Street investors, who have pushed the company’s stock beyond US$340 per share, are growing impatient with the losses.
The company reached 5,000 per week as Musk spent many nights inside the Fremont, California, factory that once belonged to a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota. To quickly put another assembly line in place, Tesla built a large tent at the factory site. Musk told investors on a first-quarter earnings conference call that the company relied too heavily on automation. It had to hire more people to work at the factory.
Many have been waiting since March of 2016, when Tesla began taking orders with a US$1,000 refundable deposit.
The company might also have to deal with some safety issues. Investigators from two federal agencies are looking into five crashes of its vehicles, some involving the semi-autonomous Autopilot system or post-crash battery fires that have been difficult to extinguish.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day