Costa Samaras, an assistant professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University, said that Tesla’s sales in 2015 were 51 percent higher than in 2014.
If the company delivers its estimated 90,000 vehicles this year, that will be a 260 percent growth rate from last year, he said. But he noted that in Tesla’s annual report, or 10-K SEC filing, the company said that it’s going to make significant investments in its Fremont, Calif., plant to start Model 3 production in late 2017. “They have to make all 3 lines in Fremont,” Samaras said in a message. So if Tesla sold 90,000 this year and wanted to build 283,000 Model 3s, and the same combined 90,000 of the Model S and X in 2017, “they’d have to grow another 314 [percent] in 2017. This is a massive scale-up. Is it doable?”