A few quick thoughts on Tesla's 2018 production. Bloomberg's Tesla Model 3 tracker shows growth slowing but stabilizing in Q4. It looks like Tesla is on track to beat Q3 by ~10-15%—somewhere in the range of 60k cars 1/ bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-… 
Tesla hasn't put out any Q4 guidance for unit sales, which is unusual. But it appears to be almost exactly on track for a quarter million vehicles in 2018. That's an increase of about 150% over 2017 2/
In that time, Tesla's weekly production rate will have more than tripled. Tesla is likely to start 2019 making roughly 7k+ total cars/week (350k/yr). But they plan to continue to ramp, possibly putting 500k/year on the table for 2019 3/
When Musk announced the Gigafactory in 2014, he said he could make 500k electric cars in 2020, which everyone thought was nuts. Two years later he said he could actually get it done in 2018, which was extra nuts 4/
It now looks like Musk has blown his 500k in 2018 target by half—an extraordinary miss. But he's well on his way to beat his earlier 500k by 2020 goal. As 2018 comes to an end, so does the worst of Tesla's hellish Model 3 launch and the first phase of the Gigafactory strategy 5/
