Production for the Model 3 - Tesla's long-anticipated electric vehicle targeted towards the mass-market buyer - has been a major topic of conversation ever since the car was unveiled in May 2016.
Tesla faced multiple bottlenecks in production early on as demand for the vehicles exploded almost immediately. Elon Musk predicted Tesla could make 20,000 Model 3s per month by December 2017, but even as records for total vehicle production (Model S, Model X, and Model 3 combined) were met, Tesla got heat from investors for missing the mark on Model 3s by a significant margin.
On Monday, however, Tesla announced it had produced a total of 53,339 vehicles in the last quarter, and that 28,578 of those vehicles were Model 3 cars. As visualized by this chart from Statista, that's three times the number of Model 3s produced in Q1 and the first time the mass-market vehicle claimed over half of all Tesla vehicles produced in a quarter.
In fact, the total number of vehicles produced was significantly higher than it's been in any previous quarter - twice the vehicle production from the same time last year, and more than all of 2015 combined.
Jenny Cheng/Business Insider
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