In recent interviews Elon Musk refused to say how many cars had been built by Tesla.
Elon Musk, after scamming a number of other cities about their factory, bought the NUMMI car factory in Fremont. NUMMI was built by Toyota and General Motors and operated as the premiere showcase car factory in the world. GM was using it to learn how Toyota builds cars so good.
It was built to deliver 500,000 CARS PER YEAR!!
500,000 CARS PER YEAR IS WHAT NUMMI WAS FULLY EQUIPPED TO BUILD!!
NUMMI could rapidly shift from one new car design to the next if people knew what they were doing. NUMMI switched out between the Chevy Nova, The Geo Prizm, The Chevy Prizm, The Hilux, The Voltz, The Vibe, Tacoma Pick-up Trucks, The Matrix and could change up to a whole new car within 19 days.
This was a ready-to-go car factory. There should have been no learning curve, no “build-a-new-car factory” delays, it should have been all up and running per the notarized written assurances Tesla gave to the DOE, In WRITING!
So Musk got it and fired all of the car builders.
Tesla has been trying to get people to buy a non-hand-built version of their car since 2003!!! That is a LONG TIME. GM AND TOYOTA built a ton of new car designs in the same factory in the same time-span!!
SO… after spending HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of YOUR TAX DOLLARS and beating their awful car design for a decade, how many cars have they built?:
255 CARS!!!
They are still hand building the cars. The factory turns out to be almost unused except as a very expensive roof.
In a 500,000 car capacity ready-to-go, state-of-the-art car factory after spending hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars for a factory that GM AND Toyota had already tuned up they find that EVERYBODY thinks their car is a narcissistic Stanford yuppie Sandhill Road rich frat-boy meat-head man-toy! Nobody wants it!!!