Hah! I knew I wasn't the only one who noticed that. It's like the old joke:
> Q: How do you expect to stay in business if you lose money on every sale?
> A: Easy. We'll make it up on volume!
More seriously, a production line has huge fixed costs associated with it, so you really need to get the most throughput out of it that you can, in order to maximize profits.
Generally speaking, the cost per unit goes down as throughput goes up, especially in the car manufacturing space. Production rate is insanely important to car manufacturers making any money at all.
Virtually every single new mass produced vehicle ever made started off losing money on a per-unit basis until manufacturing scales.
cost per unit = cost per unit + total non-unit costs/total units.
So they're loosing money overall, but the unit economics may still work.
Famously, GM used to spend ridiculous amounts of time and money to fix cars coming out of some of its plants. It wasn't uncommon for some cars to be incapable of being driven out of the plant. The more cars they made, the more errors, and the more time and money spent on fixing them. This was a major factor in the development of the NUMMI plant.
What brings cost down is increased quality, reduction of waste, and increase of speed. If you don't have all three you aren't gonna save money.
But in this case, it's likely just BS. They're probably just taking the yearly loss and dividing it by the number produced. Which is different from each marginal car produced costing them 30K.
edit to add: the article claims the main reason for them losing so much money is lack of throughput, which demonstrates that the claim is bullshit. If they made even more cars and "lost 30K" on each one they'd be worse off.