In a letter to shareholders on Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and CFO Jason Wheeler assured investors and customers that the electric-vehicle manufacturer’s reported troubles have been largely exaggerated. Deliveries are on the upswing, and 325,000 reservations were taken for the Model 3 sedan in just one week. And yet, despite announcing a planned start-of-production date of July 1, 2017, for the Model 3 sedan, MarketWatch reports that Musk expressed hesitation about actually hitting that deadline in a follow-up conference call, telling those on the line: “The July 1 date is not a date that will actually be met.”
Product delays are nothing new for Tesla, of course; both the Model S and the Model X were plagued by setbacks. The two electric vehicles also have suffered from quality issues since entering production. For the Model 3, the July date seems more like a goal for Tesla and its suppliers to shoot for, with Musk and Wheeler writing that the 2017 production date allows Tesla to hold “both ourselves and our suppliers accountable to be ready for volume production in advance of that timing.” In addition to the ambitious target for the Model 3 launch, the Tesla executives announced plans to sell 500,000 vehicles per year by 2018?two years earlier than the previously stated goal?and 1 million cars by 2020 (a total volume that would require an additional assembly plant).

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