Tesla appears to be making steady progress in Model 3 production

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"Tesla employees say to expect more Model 3 delays," read a headline from CNBC yesterday. CNBC's Lora Kolodny reported that despite Tesla's ambitions to run a highly automated manufacturing process, Tesla has been being forced to perform some battery-assembly steps in its Nevada Gigafactory by hand, borrowing scores of employees from its battery partner, Panasonic, to do it.

It sounds like a big headache for the Palo Alto carmaker until you notice one key detail: the article is talking about the state of Tesla's manufacturing operation "as recently as mid-December."

In December, Tesla and Panasonic workers were manually assembling bandoliers, rows of lithium-ion cells glued on either side of a cooling tube. It's a tricky task to complete by hand, so the manual assembly led to a lot of errors and waste.

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