Tesla recently reiterated its plans to open its own auto body shops.
In their first-quarter letter to shareholders, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and CFO Deepak Ahuja assert that the automaker sees “substantial revenue-generating opportunities as we open our own body shops in 2018 to improve costs of out-of-warranty repairers and as we increase our offering of accessories and merchandise.”
If that feels like déjà vu, it’s because Musk and Ahuja made a similar statement in their first-quarter 2017 letter to shareholders.
“To significantly improve the customer experience with out-of-warranty body repairs, we intend to open the first Tesla-owned body repair shops later this year and expand the existing network of third-party Tesla certified body shops,” the duo said in the May 2017 letter.
Whether Tesla is able to follow through on its plans this year – and how the automaker can make collision repair a significant profit center – remains to be seen.
Tesla, which has been dealing with some well-publicized manufacturing bottlenecks, missed its weekly production targets for the Model 3 in the first quarter. Musk and Ahuja, in their new letter to shareholders, acknowledge that Tesla “made a mistake by adding too much automation too quickly” in the Model 3 production process.
For first-quarter 2018, Tesla reported revenue of $2.74 billion, a 19 percent increase over first-quarter 2017.
