Depending on who you talk to, Tesla is heading one of two ways. Either it’s revolutionising the car industry by streamlining production on the way to its goal of selling 20 million cars a year by 2030 or it’s plummeting headlong into making the classic car-industry error of creating the capacity to build too many cars with too few customers.
Tesla’s presentation earlier this month held at its headquarters in Austin, Texas, disappointed many for not revealing the ‘next-generation’ model that’s going to juice the company’s next big sales push.
What CEO Elon Musk did instead was parade his executives to talk at a deeper level than ever before about how Tesla was going to drive down the cost of future vehicles, including replacing Henry Ford’s linear production process with an ‘Unboxed’ concept whereby finished sections all come together in a final frenzy of highly efficient assembly.
While this was engrossing, it left many analysts wondering exactly how Tesla was going hit all its annual sales targets on the way to 20m, given that it’s currently relying on almost entirely on Model Y and Model 3 with nothing visible in the pipeline until 2025 at the earliest.