Skepticism of hitting goals by certain dates are fair. But you are conflating skepticism of promises of meeting milestones with the ability to execute at all. They met the 5000 car a week goal. There was no promise of a date for a consistent 5000 cars a week. Is your claim that you are skeptical that they can ever hit a regular 5000 cars a week?
> There was no promise of a date for a consistent 5000 cars a week
I'm pretty sure that was December 2017 [1]
[1] "Chief Executive Elon Musk announced that production of its mass-market Model 3 would start this week and build to 20,000 per month in December. " - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-model-idUSKBN19O0GE
That's an old article, and Musk has since updated his estimates and dates, and was explicit that they would target burst builds before ramping full-time [1]. But that's beside the point - the question is, what is the source of skepticism of the ability to execute at all (not by a particular target date)? We can go back and forth on dates and numbers all day, but that's not my question.
> Skepticism of hitting goals by certain dates are fair. But you are conflating skepticism of promises of meeting milestones with the ability to execute at all.
One of the things from the Jalopnik piece that blew my mind was this:
> For other tasks, the reliance on robots has proved a headache. For months, Tesla engineers struggled to get a robot to guide a bolt through a hole accurately to secure part of the rear brake. They found a maddeningly simple solution: Instead of using a bolt with a flat tip on its threaded end, engineers switched to a bolt with a tapered point, known as a “lead-in,” that can be guided through the hole even if the robot is a millimeter off dead center, Mr. Moravy said.
Tesla is reinventing the wheel, so, yes there's going to be some doubt about their ability to execute. To my untrained eyes using the wrong bolt seems like a total rookie mistake. Even if not... Tesla spent months trying to thread a bolt. That's time and effort they could have spent on higher value propositions like fit and finish.
