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Musk: Tesla Was Weeks from Collapse Over Model 3 Woes
Tesla Inc.’s struggle to fix production problems with its electric Model 3 sedan earlier this year brought the carmakers within weeks of financial collapse, says CEO Elon Musk.
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Tesla Inc.’s struggle to fix production problems with its electric Model 3 sedan earlier this year brought the carmakers within weeks of financial collapse, says CEO Elon Musk.
Musk tells news service Axios that Tesla was “bleeding money like crazy” as it struggled through the first half of 2018 to accelerate production of the repeatedly delayed Model 3. The car, which went into limited production late last year, is considered critical to the company’s financial sustainability.
“If we didn’t solve these problems in a very short period of time,” he adds, “we would die.” The company has since reached its goal of building about 5,000 Model 3s per week. More recently it has scrambled to solve distribution problems in delivering the cars to buyers.
It wasn’t Tesla’s first brush with bankruptcy. Musk noted previously that Tesla also came perilously close to collapse in 2008. At the time, he figured the company had less than a 10% likelihood to survive.
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