Tesla forced to pause production to clear bottleneck

Tesla has confirmed that production of its Model 3 was suspended in the last week of February to fix automation issues and address a manufacturing bottleneck.

The US car-maker claims the production freeze, which occurred over February 20-24, will help it ramp up the number of cars it produces to 2500 cars per week by the end of March.

Before the factory stoppage, insiders had reported that Tesla employees were making batteries by hand in a desperate attempt to meet demand. According to reports, battery partner Panasonic was forced to lend Tesla extra technicians to deal with the backlog.

Other reports suggest quality control may have also been reduced at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, with inexperienced workers put in charge of monitoring output.

Responding to the allegations of handmade batteries, a Tesla spokesman confirmed that some stages of production had required manual work but said such processes had been expected and discussed in a third-quarter 2017 financial results call to investors by CEO Elon Musk.

According to Tesla, the manual work has had "no impact on the quality or safety of the batteries".

The announcement that Tesla was tackling bottlenecks in the production of the Model 3 follows a similar declaration of issues at the factory in the tail-end of 2017.

Musk admitted last October that the company was "deep in production hell", which was reflected by the fact just 220 Model 3 sedans were delivered in the third quarter of 2017 -- well under Tesla's forecast to manufacture more than 1500 vehicles in the same period.

Just 1550 Model 3s were shipped to customers in the fourth quarter of 2017 -- well short of the 4100 cars expected.

The new target of 2500 per week by the end of this month is now in place. Originally, Tesla claimed it would be making double that number of Model 3s by now.

Tesla now says it will make 5000 Model 3s per week by June and, eventually, 10,000 a week at its Californian facility, which is slowly beginning fulfil an order bank that's thought to exceed 400,000 requests for the firm's entry-level vehicle.

It's not clear if the backlog will affect Australian deliveries of the Model 3, which are not due to commence until next year, but Tesla's production issues should have been ironed out by then.

It's not all bad news for the US car-maker. In the final quarter of 2017 Tesla managed to deliver 15,200 Model S and 13,120 Model X vehicles which, along with the small number of Model 3s produced, saw it fulfill its promise to deliver 30,000 cars.