While Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) has been beating its own financial targets for the last several quarters, there’s one area in which the automaker might be slipping. Eric Loveday of Inside EVs picked up on a few lines from Tesla’s first quarter earnings report which he believes suggest a delay in production and delivery for the first Model X crossover vehicles.
Tesla slips in Model X mention
He pointed to these statements from Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA)’s quarterly report. The automaker said “extensive development work” on the Model X is currently underway and that it expects to have “production design prototypes” ready to go in the fourth quarter. The automaker also said its efforts are “on track to ramp up production in the spring of 2015.”
According to Inside EVs, Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) most likely won’t be delivering a single Model X this year, as the design prototype isn’t expected to be ready until the fourth quarter. The site also notes that in the past, Tesla said it expected the Model X to be in limited production by the end of this year and mass production by April 2015.
Tesla to push Model X deliveries back to March?
Loveday notes that since mass production isn’t expected to begin until April 2015 and then ramp by spring 2015, then this gives a time frame of between March and June. The author states that when automakers change from providing a specific month of when deliveries will be made to a vaguer season reference, that generally suggests that it will happen by the end of that season.
The author then takes us back to 2012 when Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) said it would launch the Model X in late 2013. Also the early 2014 deliveries were pushed back again, as Tesla announced in March 2013 that it was pushing production back a year. This time around, the delay appears to be only a few months, but will investors start getting concerned about these multiple delays? So far, they don’t seem worried, as the automaker’s shares rose nearly 2% today.
Based on past promises, Loveday predicts that Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) will indeed start limited production on the Model X in the second quarter of 2015 and then slowly ramp up production rates and perhaps not hit full production status until late 2015.
