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Tesla announced over the weekend that it missed its — admittedly ambitious — delivery and production goals for the second quarter in a row.
In May, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said despite missing his goal of delivering 16,000 vehicles during the first quarter, he expected the company to be able to produce 20,000 cars and ship 17,000 of them in the second quarter. But Tesla missed that goal, producing 18,345 cars and shipping 14,370 during the period.
It’s not exactly a good sign for things to come, now that it’s a little less than a year before the company hopes to begin production on the nearly 400,000 Model 3s that have been reserved. Not only did the company miss its shipment and production goals, but the number of shipments actually declined from the first quarter to the second.
That said, the company is still pledging that it can meet its goal of shipping 80,000 to 90,000 cars by the end of 2016. “In total, Tesla expects to produce and deliver about 50,000 vehicles during the second half of 2016, approximately equal to all of 2015,” it said in a statement.
As of now, the company has shipped a total of 29,190 vehicles in 2016 with 5,150 cars in transit. So at the beginning of the third quarter, Tesla is expected to have shipped 34,340 cars. That means the company has to deliver 45,660 more cars to meet the low end of its shipment goal for the year.
In spite of remaining confident, Musk conceded that Tesla has to rethink the production planning for its first-ever mass-market car.
Tesla analysts are not surprised. In a note to clients Tuesday morning, Deutsche Bank analyst Rod Lache said while he was “mildly disappointed,” he wasn’t shocked. He attributed the company’s missed deadlines to, essentially, being too ambitious. Tesla’s stock fell close to 4 percent in the pre-market.
“This is not the first time Tesla has missed an aggressive target,” he wrote. “Tesla has admitted to over-reaching on the complex design of Model X, and they are paying the price. Aggressive plans (for expansion, production, vertical integration, new markets and features such as Autopilot) are part of Tesla’s DNA.”
The company gave a similar explanation when it announced that it had missed its delivery expectations in the first quarter and only shipped 14,820 of its vehicles.
“The root causes of the parts shortages were: Tesla's hubris in adding far too much new technology to the Model X in version 1, insufficient supplier capability validation, and Tesla not having broad enough internal capability to manufacture the parts in-house,” the company wrote in April.
In an interview at this year’s Code Conference, Musk attributed the supplier delay to miscellaneous things like a shootout on the Mexican border and an earthquake. But the company ultimately chalked up its inability to meet its own deadlines to hubris.
Hubris may still be at the center. In his letter to shareholders at the end of the first quarter, Musk said the company had all but solved its supply chain issues. Now, Tesla says deliveries were delayed because of “the extreme production ramp in Q2 and the high mix of customer-ordered vehicles still on trucks and ships at the end of the quarter.” Many of Tesla’s customers order customized vehicles and the factory produces each car in the order it was purchased.
Now, Lache is adjusting his Tesla estimates for the year to a loss of $0.42 per share from a profit of $0.09.
But he outlines a few reasons to remain positive.
“We currently see at least 3 significant drivers for the stock: 1) Increasing visibility into TSLA’s business plan; 2) Re-focusing Tesla’s strategy on execution of this plan (most investors, and we suspect most Tesla customers, have not yet signed up to all aspects of management’s plans for a broadly defined sustainable energy company); and 3) Achieving execution milestones (i.e. production, cash flow).”
Read this next: With the Model 3, will Tesla’s cult-like following stay that way?
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
