I found something a bit strange and confusing in this quarter’s Tesla shareholder letter and conference call. Much of the news in recent weeks was about Tesla reportedly dropping the lower-cost car it was supposed to be working on. That stemmed from a pretty detailed and convincing report from“liars,” but then seemed to confirm portions of the report. In the Tesla shareholder letter, there is no mention of a more affordable Tesla car or progress on getting to one.
First of all, the wording has clearly shifted from a focus on “new, more affordable model” to “next gen platform.” I know both were used before, but there’s clearly been a drop in emphasis from the former. Looking at all of this together, these are things that I think happened with the cheaper “Model C” that Tesla had been talking about and working on, as well as the next gen platform overall:
They had a team work on creating a modified platform and modified future models based off of Tesla’s current high-volume models that would be more like variations of their current products than some whole new thing. Again, it was about cutting costs and accelerating the introduction of new models.