Tesla Model Y early production, Gigafactory Europe announcement soon, more from Q3 earnings call

Tesla CEO Elon Musk made some important forward-looking statements in his opening remarks of the Tesla Q3 earnings call, he talked about the Model Y production schedule, Gigafactory Europe, Gigafactory Shanghai, Smart Summon improvement and a lot more.

The Tesla Q3 earnings call proved to be the best thing happened to Tesla this year as TSLA stock surged over 20% and is still climbing.

Early Model Y Production

According to Elon Musk, Tesla Model Y production has been re-scheduled to Summer 2020 instead of fall, this is great news for Model Y reservation holders and potential Tesla Model Y customers, as they will get their hands on their cars earlier than expected.

We predicted the Model Y earlier production in a previous report with the help of Tesla’s permit applications filed with the City of Fremont, also our friends at CleanTechnica reported the early Model Y production with the help of their anonymous source at Tesla — even summer 2020 is a lot sooner than most expected and we believe this time Elon Musk threw a conservative timeline out there.

The number of times at which Tesla is testing the Model Y prototypes around its HQ and even in other cities suggests production start is near, and with hands-on experience with the ‘Model 3 production hell’, things are expected to be much smoother at the Fremont factory this time.

Gigafactory 4 Europe Location

There is good news for Tesla enthusiasts in Europe as well, Tesla will be announcing the location of the Gigafactory 4 before the end of 2019.

Almost a year go Elon Musk indicated his preferred location for the Gigafactory 4 in Europe, i.e. along the German-French border which also happens to be close to the Benelux countries.

Elon Musk also tweeted the following 5 targets that Tesla achieved in its 3rd quarter of 2019 — GAAP profitable and positive free cash flow, applause! Even Wall Steet analysts couldn’t predict that, everyone got a nice little surprise.

Tesla Q3 Earnings Call

The call was recorded by CleanTechnica and you can listen to the entire call in the video below, according to an estimate, Tesla short sellers and bears lost around $1.4 billion during the call as the stock price started to surge — watching that much money evaporate in a matter of minutes is not a good sight but Tesla did a fantastic job at blowing expectations.

Transcript of Elon Musk’s opening remarks at the Tesla Q3′ 2019 Earnings Call

Thank you. First of all, I’d like to just thank the Tesla team for an incredible job this quarter. The execution was outstanding and — on just about every front. So it’s just an honor to work with such a great team.

Q3 was obviously a very strong quarter and we had record deliveries, we’re able to make great strides and controlling our costs. We shifted back to GAAP profitability while also generating strong free cash flow. And again, this would not be possible without each employee doing their part to reduce cost. Our operating cost is now at the lowest level since Model 3 production started.

Regarding Gigafactory, Shanghai, this month we started with trial production at Giga Shanghai and built four [Phonetic] vehicles from body, to paint, to general assembly. So this is a — more emphasis this is [Phonetic] a real factory with a tremendous amount of equipment in it. While a lot of people see the outside show the factory, which is enormous, and it was essentially underwater in January. It was below the water table literally. What is, I think, much more significant is that we’re able to install massive stamping machines, fully operational paint shop and a sophisticated general assembly line in the same period of time, in parallel with bogue building I’d like to thank our transient for this extraordinary achievement I’m not aware of any factory of this magnitude in history being constructed in such a short period of time, approximately 10 months. As far as I know, this is unprecedented. And Gigafactory Shanghai will become a template for future growth. We’re planning to build model-wise in Shanghai as well of course, and build a Gigafactory in Europe and we hope to announce the location to that Gigafactory. In fact, we will announce the location to that Gigafactory before the end of this year.

Regarding Model Y, we’re also ahead of schedule on Model Y preparations in Fremont, and we’ve moved the launch timeline from full 2020 to summer 2020. There may be some room for improvement there, but we’re confident about summer 2020. I’ve actually recently driven the Model Y release candidate and think it’s going to be an amazing product and be very well received. I think it’s quite likely to — just my opinion, but I think it will outsell Model S, Model X and Model 3 combined.

Regarding Version 10 and Smart Summon, last month we released our latest Software Version 10, which includes video streaming games karaoke, Spotify and a host of other new features and improvements. Most importantly, it includes the first version of Smart Summon, which has now been used 1 million times. So, it’s now over 1 million uses of Smart Summon, and in the next week or so we will be releasing an improved version of Smart Summon taking into account all the data from those 1 million Smart Summon attempts.

So, this really illustrates the value of having a massive fleet, because it allows us to collect these corner cases and learn from them, and use street learning and become rapidly better just as Navigator and Autopilot did on the freeway. So, expect a number of improvements in Smart Summon in the weeks to come. And this is really just the beginning as we collect more data and Autopilot and Full Self-Driving functionality get better.

I do — while it’s going to be tight, it still does appear that we will be at least in limited — in early access release of a feature-complete Full Self-Driving feature this year. So, it’s not for sure, but it appears to be on track for at least an early access release of a fully functional Full Self-Driving by the end of this year.

And yeah, lastly, we’re highly focused on decisions that really make a material difference to the company, such as opening Gigafactories in other continents. Yes, it’s worth noting that these geared ultimately having three Gigafactories effectively will triple out our output. And then when you consider increased output per Gigafactory, it’s going to actually more than triple our output over time. And then, there are a lot of interesting things happening with respect to advanced batteries and more efficient powertrains, and full self-driving and all that sort of stuff, but that will be something for a future time.

And then, one last item is that tomorrow afternoon, we will be releasing Version 3 of the Tesla Solar Roof. That’s the integrated solar panels integrated with the roof. So that’s — I think this is a great product. Version 1 and 2 where we’re still sort of figuring things out. Version 3, I think, is finally ready for the big time. And so we’re scaling up production of the Version 3 solar tower roof at our buffalo Gigafactory. And I think this product is going to be incredible.

But we’ll talk more about that on the official product launch, which will be tomorrow afternoon.

Read the entire call transcript at NASDAQ.

Related: Tesla Model 3 production up 135% and deliveries 175% since 2019, more Tesla growth stats

For geeks that love the numbers and the stock market investment game, Galileo Russel from Hyperchange TV did an excellent analysis, you can also find the Tesla Q3′ 2019 update letter PDF below for reference and a deeper study of Tesla’s performance in this quarter.

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Tesla Q3′ 2019 Investor Update Letter