The electric vehicle company wants to focus on scaling and its output
For those who expected a spectacular announcement, the disappointment will be immense. Tesla (TSLA) – Get Tesla Inc Report won’t announce a new car model this year, CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday.
“We will not be introducing new vehicle models this year,” Musk said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, adding that it “would not make any sense because we will still be part constrained.”
Instead, Tesla will focus on “scaling” and “output”
Tesla on Wednesday posted record fourth-quarter revenues of $17.7 billion, but noted that supply chain disruptions have held back production capacity and will likely extended into 2022.
Musk said, “I’m not going to go through every sort of thing that we’re working on because I think a lot of them deserve product launches of their own, as opposed to a few minutes on an earnings call. So I’ll talk kind of at a high level, yeah, mostly at a high level. The fundamental focus for Tesla this year is scaling output.”
Musk says introducing new vehicles would affect the company’s production rates and deliveries.
“If we were to introduce new vehicles, our total vehicle output would decrease. This is a very important point that I think people do not understand. So last year, we spent a lot of engineering and management resources, solving supply-chain issues, rewriting code, changing our chips, reducing the number of chips we need,” Musk explained.
Musk said that even if Tesla had produced a new model last year, total vehicle output would have remained the same due to chip supply constraints.
Said the billionaire, “if we actually introduce an additional product that would then require a bunch of attention and resources on that increased complexity of the additional product, resulting in fewer vehicles actually being delivered…”
Tesla delivered 936,172 cars in 2021, and produced 930,422. The manufacturer currently sells 4 models: Model S, Model X, Model Y and Model 3.
