Elon Reeve Musk - Tesla, Inc.
Management
Well, I feel pretty confident that we should get there by the end of this year, to 5,000 a week. Now, I do want to separate this from parts orders. I know a number of our suppliers are listening. It's impossible to keep – like nothing is a secret these days, it seems. Yes. It's like major intelligence organizations cannot keep a secret. It's like, really – I don't know who can, honestly. So, when we place parts orders with our suppliers, we've told them 1,000 a week in July, 2,000 a week in August, and 4,000 a week in September. These are parts orders. Then the parts need to arrive. They need to be turned into a car. And the car needs to be delivered to customers. None of these things occur instantaneously. And we have what I call, like, maybe the term paper problem of, like, I was a teaching assistant in college. And no matter what date we set the exam paper for, when the term paper was due, there's always like some number of people that are late. It's just the way it goes. People sometimes – well, and I'm guilty of this too. Like too optimistic about the timing or they get unlucky or something like that. So, we have to set these really strict dates, then some number of people are late, but it only has to be (34:27) 1%, and then we either have to make those parts manually at great cost or slow down the production rate. And when I say great cost, when you make something manually as opposed to through mass production, it can be 10 times, 20 times, 30 times more than a part that's handmade as opposed to made with high volume production equipment. So, that's essentially – I'm trying to give you, like, what's the problem space look like in my head so that you can at least try to model it. You know what I know. And if I knew which 1% of suppliers it was, right now, I would honestly take action. But I don't because I don't know who's going to be unlucky. I don't know who's being really optimistic. But the 1,000, 2,000, 4,000, those are the deadlines we've set out for our suppliers for parts delivery and then parts get made into cars, cars need to get delivered. Those are three separate steps.