Tesla CEO Elon Musk has emailed employees outlining the company’s strategy in handling end of quarter deliveries for Q4, which should focus on efficiency.
The email obtained by Tesla North was sent by Musk on Friday around 6pm and explains employees should focus on lowering Tesla’s cost of deliveries, instead of spending on overtime hours.
Musk says Tesla still has “quite a big wave of deliveries” in the last few weeks of next month, with Giga Shanghai and Fremont in full swing, sending cars to Europe and to the U.S. east coast.
“The right principle is: take the most efficient action, as though we were not publicly traded and the notion of “end of quarter” didn’t exist,” explained Musk, rallying his troops.
You can read the full email in its entirety, below:
Per my email several weeks ago, our focus this quarter should be on minimizing *cost* of deliveries, rather than spending heavily on expedite fees, overtime and temporary contractors just so that cars arrive in Q4. What has happened historically is that we sprint like crazy at end of quarter to maximize deliveries, but then deliveries drop massively in the first few weeks of the next quarter. In effect, looked at over a six month period, we won’t have delivered any extra cars, but we will have spent a lot of money and burned ourselves out to accelerate deliveries in the last two weeks of each quarter!
We will still have quite a big wave of deliveries in the last few weeks of December, as we don’t yet have high volume production either in Europe or Texas, which means a lot of cars on boats from China to Europe and on trucks/rail from California to the East Coast arriving late in quarter, but this is nonetheless the right time to start reducing the size of the wave in favor of a steadier and more efficient pace of deliveries. The right principle is: take the most efficient action, as though we were not publicly traded and the notion of “end of quarter” didn’t exist.
Thanks,
Elon
Musk treats Tesla like a nimble startup and in doing so, allows the company to move quickly and swiftly, without getting bogged down with bureaucracy and micromanagement.
