This post from Tesla's CEO shows me partially wrong as Tesla is shipping cars.
You know of course the saying “Good things are worth waiting for” … undoubtedly we were trying the truism of this adage longer than warranted, but we have broken the logjam. We are delivering the Roadster to our customers. Already 9 production Roadsters have arrived in California, another 3 arrive this weekend, and they will keep arriving at the rate of 4 per week (except for the scheduled factory shut down in the last two weeks of August). In fact, currently there are 27 Roadsters in various stages of assembly. In large measure we deliberately limit the production until we install our own born and bred final transmission by mid-September, at which time production will start to ramp up leading toward a monthly rate of over 100 cars in December.
More at link:
Update on Production.
Of course they say they won't be ramped up to 100 cars per month until December, which means they have no way of delivering this year's or next year's cars on time. They need to get the build numbers up. Up to 200 or more if they're going to meet their existing sales and projected sales numbers for this year and next.
But the cars are being built. And they recently hired a senior executive from Chrysler to help run the place so I may be even more wrong, but gladly so. Hopefully the price of the new Whitestar will be reasonable and the car practical.