Tesla’s business model was selling emissions credits to other firms. Those credits are coming to an end, so profit making inventory is shrinking.
E car engineers attacked the wrong problem; range, they should of concentrated on speeding up the recharge time instead. Quick recharge makes range a lesser concern.
Bottom line: It is an expensive, nice looking very unreliable car. Tesla has come to mean “car no go far”.
If they would stop spending 100’s of thousands of dollars building 8 bank charging stations in areas that the stations have never been used and only see cars every 3 or 4 months, they might catch up a little bit.
We could go the slot car route and put a metal groove down the middle of the road.
Was at a party early this summer when the subject turned to Tesla, and specifically, Elon Musk, I opined basically that Musk and Tesla was a fraud with nothing much to show after billions and billions of taxpayer subsidies. A financial advisor friend halted me and said that he liked Musk and thought he was going to do great. I thought, wow, this guy, like so many others are easily distracted by shiny things and squirrels.
Musk has basically played with billions of taxpayer money and after years of incessant hype from nearly every Amen corner on the web in in the MSM, he still has basically nothing to show of real value.
Musk/Tesla have little intrinsic value except a really cool concept car for the wealthy who eagerly seek out the latest fad to set them apart as being edgy, come to think of it, its kinda like why the wealthy love Bernie Sanders.
It was pretty clear to the auto industry that the Tesla, even at its steep price tag, was not being sold at a profit or even at cost. That’s why no one attempted a cheaper knock-off, not even the Chinese.
Musk has probably paid himself handsomely already, but the goal is to sell Tesla to some company like Toyota, who can be pressured to keep manufacturing Teslas at a loss for political reasons. A lot of small, high-mpg cars (like Smart) are sold at no profit.
But they got some dunderheads to give them a really sweet deal on a bunch of land to build a new plant on very recently. I think it was Nevada.