Tesla gears up for a record-breaking year

Elon Musk has a track record of getting into hot water with regulators in the US thanks to unguarded tweets.

In February, that was once again the case when Musk suggested on Twitter that his company, electric-car maker Tesla, would make 500,000 vehicles this year – a move that prompted US regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to ask a judge to find him in contempt of court.

It wasn’t the first time Musk had fallen foul of the SEC, which takes a dim view of social media activity by executives that can boost a company’s share price. The regulator forced a $40m settlement from Musk over a row in August 2018 spurred by him tweeting that he had secured a buyout for Tesla.

This time, Musk subsequently confirmed in a follow-up message that Tesla will actually deliver 400,000 cars this year, the correct forecast.

Overly ambitious tweets aside, it is likely that 2019 will be key for Musk’s electric-car project. Tesla’s Model 3, a small, simple vehicle designed to be the world’s first mass-market electric car, was made available at a reduced price of $35,000 in February, making it Tesla’s most affordable vehicle to date. Production of Tesla vehicles in the fourth quarter of 2018 stood at 86,555 – a quarterly record for the company.

“To put our growth into perspective, we delivered almost as many vehicles in 2018 as we did in all prior years combined,” Tesla said. Analyst Bloomberg estimates that Tesla is producing approximately 5,600 Model 3 vehicles a week and has produced almost 211,000 since the launch of the car four years ago.

Musk’s project management

Musk’s ingenuity, engineering brilliance and charisma have won him favour among the project management community. Project News Today said last year that: “Elon Musk has had lots of success over the years and there is lots he can teach us about how to do projects better.”

Factors behind the success of Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX include his communication skills, leadership qualities, mental resilience (SpaceX endured three failed launches of its Falcon 1 rocket prior to the successful launch of Crew Dragon in March) and the ability to challenge his project teams to be ultra-prepared at all times.

There’s a wider affinity in terms of sustainability, too. The Project Management Hacks website approvingly notes that Musk’s example is a demonstration of the fact that “making the world a better place is one of the draws to project management” and that “achieving that goal requires both strong skills and a vision”.

When it comes to communication, Musk is said to value what we might think of as an ‘agile’, non-hierarchical approach to problem-solving.

“Anyone at Tesla can and should email/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company,” he wrote in an email quoted by Business Insider. “You can talk to your manager’s manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another department, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else’s permission.”

Musk also encourages project thinking based on first principles – boiling a situation down to its basic, fundamental truth and reasoning up from the basic position, the antithesis to making decisions based on common knowledge. That’s part of the project strategy that is said to have enabled SpaceX to develop a rocket at a fraction of the cost of many existing designs.

Can Tesla hit its targets?

Despite its founder attracting the ire of regulators and some well-publicised production problems, Tesla itself has said its Model 3 drove what was “likely [to] represent the biggest single-year growth in the history of the automotive industry” in 2018.

Musk’s company started the year with a delivery run rate of about 120,000 vehicles a year, and ended it at more than 350,000 vehicles. As a result, Tesla cars such as the Model 3 are “making a tangible impact on accelerating the world to sustainable energy”, the company said. There were other achievements. Last year was also the first in decades that a US car – in this case, the Model 3 – was the best-selling premium vehicle in North America for the year, Tesla said. A further ramp up in production of the Model 3 will be needed this year to meet the overall 400,000-vehicle target. Musk himself has acknowledged that his Fremont, California, production facility has an excessive level of automation, causing delays to production.

Although Musk’s ambitious forecasts are sometimes out of step with reality, the breadth of his vision for his various projects will ensure that he continues to make waves. It will be interesting to see if the Model 3 genuinely does become the world’s first mass-market electric car in 2019, fulfilling Musk’s original vision.

“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour,” he has said.

Project managers who have battled to successfully complete projects that seem to have had little initial chance of success will continue to find inspiration in his example.

Elon Musk on leadership

How to be a great project leader:

1 Hire people who are smarter than you

2 Do not go with the flow – challenge the status quo

3 Focus on the foundation first – understand the fundamentals of what you’re doing

Elon Musk: high-tech project pioneer

As well as being co-founder, chief executive and product architect of Tesla, Elon Musk is co-founder and chief executive of Neuralink; founder and chief executive of SpaceX; founder of The Boring Company; and co-founder of PayPal. Neuralink is developing implantable brain-computer interfaces, while The Boring Company is an infrastructure and tunnel construction company established by Musk in 2016. SpaceX was founded in 2002 to reduce space transportation costs and enable the colonisation of Mars. It’s developed the Falcon launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft family, which both deliver payloads into orbit.

NASA believes Crew Dragon could be used to transport astronauts to the International Space Station and return them safely to Earth. SpaceX conducted the maiden launch of its Crew Dragon spacecraft as part of a NASA-required demonstration flight in March. The first crewed Crew Dragon is expected to be launched this year.