Troubled electric car maker Tesla Inc. has lost its top engineer, but today it said it has finally hit production targets on the Model 3 assembly line.

Doug Field, Tesla’s senior vice president of engineering, left the company last week after a leave of absence, according to the Wall Street Journal. A Tesla spokesperson confirmed the news, saying in a statement that “after almost five years at Tesla, Doug Field is moving on” and that “we’d like to thank Doug for his hard work over the years and for everything he has done for Tesla.”

Field had been reported May 11 to have taken a “six-week sabbatical.” Tesla said at the time that he was “just taking some time off to recharge and spend time with his family” and that he had not left the company.

The now-former engineer, who joined Tesla in 2013, had been directly responsible for the development of the $35,000 Model 3, the very same car line that has been causing the electric car maker issues since the middle of last year.

Tesla raised $1.15 billion to bring the model into production in March 2017. At the time, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk predicted that the company would make between 100,000 and 200,000 Model 3 vehicles during the second half of 2017. But then the wheels fell off, or more accurately in this case, they were never attached to the Model 3s to begin.

Issues started to emerge in August when Tesla raised an additional $1.5 billion to ramp up production and revised its production numbers down to 5,000 vehicles a week by the end of the year.

By November, off the back of a record loss, Tesla revised its numbers again, saying it hoped to be manufacturing 5,000 Model 3 vehicles a week in the first quarter of 2018. Fast forward again to today and it has only now reached that goal.

In a press release, Tesla said Model 3 production had hit 28,578 in the second quarter and it expects to increase production to 6,000 per week by late next month. The release also noted that the company’s manufacturing lines had first surpassed the 5,000 Model 3 mark only last week.

“The last 12 months were some of the most difficult in Tesla’s history and we are incredibly proud of the whole Tesla team for achieving the 5,000 unit Model 3 production rate,” the release stated. “It was not easy but it was definitely worth it.”

Photo: nordique/Flickr