Tesla reached a milestone critical to Elon Musk’s goal to bring electric cars to the masses — and earn some profit in the process — by exceeding a long-sought production target with the Model 3. In a second piece of good news for the company, Panasonic said on Monday it would consider further investment in Tesla’s Gigafactory if Tesla asked. The investment would come on top of the $1.6bn Panasonic is contributing to the automotive battery plant, which it jointly operates with Tesla in the US state of Nevada. By building more than 5,000 sedans in the last week of the second quarter, Tesla "just became a real car company", the CEO said in an internal e-mail on Sunday obtained by Bloomberg News. He might turn out to be right, if Tesla can hit these manufacturing goals again and again. After all, producing 5,000 units of one vehicle in a week is far from unheard of in the automotive industry and the company had to pull out all the stops to get to this point, including constructing a ten...
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