Bolstered by quarterly revenue growth, electric-car manufacturer Tesla sought to ease investor concerns Wednesday over production delays of its mass-market Model 3.
Production of the lower-cost vehicle reached 2,020 a week at the end of March, still short of its target of 2,500, but Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said he’s confident the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company will meet a target of 5,000 per week in the next two months.
“Our understanding of the production is improving,” he said on an earnings call. “With some work at the Fremont vehicle plant, primarily in the general assembly area, I’m confident that we will soon exceed the 3,000 mark.”
One of Tesla’s other initiatives, assisted-driving technology, sustained a setback earlier this year when a driver died in a crash involving one of its semi-autonomous Model X vehicles. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the incident, as well as a separate fatality in Arizona involving one of Uber’s self-driving vehicles.
In the aftermath of the Arizona crash, Gov. Doug Ducey, who previously supported the vehicles, ordered Uber to halt its tests in that state, and Senate Democrats started probing a legal loophole that could block consumers from suing autonomous-vehicle companies.
Still, self-driving car supporters in both the Obama and Trump administrations have said the technology has the potential to dramatically reduce deaths and injuries caused by distracted drivers. In 2015 alone, about 3,450 people were killed on U.S. roads and another 391,000 injured in accidents where one or more drivers weren’t paying sufficient attention, according to the traffic safety administration.
“The thing that’s tricky with autonomous vehicles is that autonomy doesn’t reduce the accident rate or fatality rate to zero, it improves it substantially,” Musk said. “Regulators respond to public pressure and the press. So if the press is hounding the regulators and the public is laboring on the apprehension that autonomy is less safe because of misleading press, this is where I find the challenge to be difficult.”
Tesla sales climbed 3.7 percent to $3.4 billion in the three months through March, and the company’s net loss widened to $709.6 million, or $4.19 a share. Available cash fell 2 percent from the end of last year to $2.67 billion.
