Throughout 2016, Tesla reaffirmed its guidance that the company would deliver between 80,000 and 90,000 vehicles by the end of the year in spite of missing its delivery goals in the first and second quarter. Today, just three days into the new year, the company announced that it only delivered 76,230 Model S and Model X cars.
Tesla missed its goal to deliver 80,000 to 90,000 cars in 2016
This time the company attributed it to production challenges related to rolling out the newest version of Autopilot.
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In the past, Tesla has attributed its inability to meet delivery goals to its own “hubris in adding far too much technology” to the Model X. At Recode’s annual Code Conference, Tesla CEO Elon Musk also said there was a delay among its suppliers because, among other things, there was a shootout on the Mexican border.
This time, the electric vehicle manufacturer said the transition from the original version of its semi-autonomous sensor suite called Autopilot to the newest iteration which includes hardware that could — when paired with fully self-driving software — enable the vehicle to completely drive itself led to delays in production and ultimately deliveries.
“We were ultimately able to recover and hit our production goal, but the delay in production resulted in challenges that impacted quarterly deliveries, including, among other things, cars missing shipping cutoffs for Europe and Asia,” the company wrote in a statement. “In total, about 2,750 vehicles missed being counted as deliveries in Q4 either due to last-minute delays in transport or because the customer was unable to physically take delivery.”
That said, it’s a big increase from the 2015 delivery rates. The company delivered only 50,557 vehicles in 2015.
Watch: New Teslas will now be built to be self-driving
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
