Tesla Model 3 may be delayed until late 2018

Recently, according to a report on the electrek website, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas has repeatedly reported positively on electric car maker Tesla. His stock forecasts for Tesla are always higher than the average target price of Tesla's stock. He was described by the New York Times as "Tesla's cheerleader."

But in the past few months, he has become more cautious in his coverage of Tesla. He currently has a hold rating on Tesla's stock and has made the most feared prediction for Tesla investors and Model 3 reservation holders: Tesla's Model 3 will be delayed by more than a year. Tesla previously said that the Model 3 would go into production in mid-2017 and achieve mass production by the end of 2017.

After Tesla released its third-quarter earnings and completed its acquisition of SolarCity, Adam Jonas wrote to clients that he had slightly adjusted his price target for Tesla stock from $245 to $242 and reiterated his previously ignored forecast:

"We continue to forecast that the Tesla Model 3 will be available in late 2018, more than a year later than Tesla originally expected, with production of 60,000 and 130,000 Model 3 units in 2019 and 2020, respectively."

Adam Jonas not only predicts that the Tesla Model 3 will be released more than a year later, he also predicts that Model 3 production will be significantly lower than Tesla's expected target production. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been telling the public that Tesla will produce as many as 400,000 Model 3 sedans in 2018, a number significantly higher than Jonas' 2019 production forecast of 60,000.

The more than 400,000 Model 3 reservation holders will be very disappointed.

Jonas has always been highly critical of Tesla. He was one of only a handful of analysts who rated Tesla a “buy” before the stock price surged in 2013. But over the past few months, Jonas’s ranking has been falling among Tip Ranks’ 4,240 analysts, currently ranking 624th, with a 44% success rate and an average return of 7%. Therefore, I agree with Jonas’s prediction, even though he is not the only analyst who has predicted a significant delay in the Tesla Model 3’s arrival.

In a letter to customers, Jonas is more optimistic about Tesla's Autopilot automatic assisted driving system:

“Developing a sustainable transportation ecosystem has always been a higher mission. We estimate that Tesla vehicles worldwide drive nearly 5 million miles per day, with one-third of those miles driven on Autopilot. Furthermore, we predict that Tesla vehicles’ daily mileage will double within a year. Tesla will therefore play a unique role in promoting advanced technologies such as autonomous driving algorithms and machine learning, which are key pillars of accident-free driving. The resulting large amounts of safety data analysis have the potential to significantly impact the perceptions of regulators, consumers, and investors.”

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.