On this week's episode of Ride the Lightning, the Tesla Motors Unofficial Podcast,

Model 3 remains on track and Tesla lays out specific production goals for the car for the rest of the year.

Plus, Model 3 Design Studio News and much, much more from this week's Q1 earnings call. Oh, Howdy fellow Tesla

Tesla enthusiasts? My name is Ryan McCaffrey and this is Ride the Lightning the Tesla Motors unofficial

podcast it's episode number 82 for February 26th 2017 and as you can tell

my voice is back I am very grateful to have my voice back. Boy, it took it. It was out for a good three days and it took a probably five for it to come all the way back. But in any case, it's a good week. It's a good timing for it to come back because it is a very, very busy week of Tesla news. In fact, I want to get right into it because I've got a bunch of fantastic little clips from Elon and Jason from the conference call

Jason Wheeler the now outgoing CFOs we'll talk about in a second but yes Tesla

had their Q1 2017 earnings call, which also doubled as the full fiscal year 2016 results call.

And in fact, I'll start by sharing with you just a couple of quick nuggets from the shareholder letter that was posted and sent out and they're both model three related these are sort of the big highlights. In there they say, quote, our model three program is on track to start limited vehicle production in July and to steadily ramp production to exceed 5,000 vehicles per week at some point in the fourth quarter

and 10,000 vehicles per week at some point in 2018. So they're careful not to make any specifics there but

that's boy if they could get to that you know even if it's just the last couple

weeks of the year that they ramped to 5,000 that would be mighty impressive considering, you know, Fremont now does about 2,000 cars a week right now.

So that would be quite impressive.

Another note from the shareholder letter,

in early February, we began building model three prototypes

as part of our ongoing testing of the vehicle design

and manufacturing processes.

Initial crash test results have been positive

and all model 3 related sourcing is on plan

to support the start of production in July.

Installation of model 3 manufacturing equipment is underway in Fremont and at Gigafactory 1,

where in January we began production of battery cells for energy storage products which have the same form

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