Comment by rootusrootus
19 hours ago
Tesla is in trouble for exactly the reasons many of us saw coming. Irrespective of Elons political antics, Teslas product offering strategy is very different from the rest of the market. They’re banking on this approach changing the market, my bet is they are wrong. Model 3 and Y are long in the tooth, getting stale.
> Model 3 and Y are long in the tooth, getting stale.
Musk's antics and focus issues (i.e. too many resources focused on Cybertruck) aside: The thing with Tesla is, they operate completely antithetical to the classic car industry.
The classic car industry designs a model series and signs four-ish year contracts with all the suppliers for the expected amount of vehicles to sell, with a few extension clauses to cover for higher than expected demand. During these four years, the "rebrush" is designed, keeping most of the car the same but incorporating learnings during production, newly developed technologies (e.g. improved compute power) and maybe retooling to make production more efficient, and then it's another four-ish years that are used to make the next generation. That business model makes sense when operating with a shit ton of suppliers, so both the manufacturer and the suppliers can plan for the mid term.
Tesla however, just like SpaceX, takes pride in not following this business model. As much as possible is made in-house, which means less vendors to deal with, and that enables continuous improvements and iteration.
The downside is that it makes life so much harder for spare parts because any given part might just have been in production for a few weeks if not days, and for consumers and consumer protection agencies it's orders of magnitude harder to warn about construction defects because there is no such thing as a "generation" any more.