The New York Times is reporting that theanotics are hurtingTesla’s brand
Tesla executives in a hurry: Why the future isn’t going to be cheap, but an approach to building a car for a cheaper future
A cheap electric car has long been a target for the company. Tesla’s first Master Plan—published in 2006, before Musk was CEO—was simple but, at the time, radical: Build an electric sports car, and use that money to build cheaper and cheaper electric cars. The Model 3, its second electric car, sold for a limited time at its target price, but the company promoted it as an all-electric car for the masses. The base model sells for $43,000. The Chevrolet Bolt, with a starting price of $26,500, and the Nissan Leaf with a starting price of $28,000, have been created to fill in the gap.
The new competition makes Musk’s recent role as the town crier for the redpilled online right especially puzzling and, for his car company, perilous. Musk’s chaotic and polarizing tenure as Twitter’s chief executive — during which he’s embraced far-right tropes about gender and journalism and public health, and generally behaved like a rich bully on a power trip — already seems to be battering Tesla’s brand. During October and November of last year, when Musk became the owner of 140-words messaging service Twitter, Sentiment toward the company plummeted, while favorability among Democrats went up.
Someone in the audience at Investor Day tried again to get Elon Musk to go back to the future, but this time he was unsuccessful. From a stage at the Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, Musk had announced an ambitious “Master Plan 3” to save the world. For $10 trillion in manufacturing investment, the world could do everything from power electric cars to ships, according to Musk.
What, an investor asked the company’s executives, would that vehicle be? Musk turned down the chance to share. “We’d be jumping the gun if we answered your question,” he said, explaining that the company would hold a separate event to roll out the mystery vehicle somewhere down the line. There are images of car forms under the gray sheets depicted in the slides shown during the presentation.
17 company executives gathered together for a round of presentations on everything from design to supply chains to manufacturing to environmental impacts and legal affairs.
The next-Generation vehicle will be at least one car, but an approach to building vehicles focusing onaffordability and desirability, the vice president of vehicle engineering said. It will be built in Mexico at a new factory that was announced at Wednesday’s event. Executives said that the next-gen vehicle had 40 percent fewer manufacturing footprints and would lower production costs by 50 percent.
Why was Master Plan 3 so Successful? Why didn’t Musk and Tesla SHOW up the Optimus Challenge? An Investor’s Perspective
“The much-anticipated theme of Master Plan 3 left me with more questions than answers,” Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, said in a note to investors.
Jessica Caldwell, the executive director of insights at edmunds said that Musk and company failed to put the cherry on top and instead looked at a lower-priced version of the car.
A second Master Plan, published in 2016, promised self-driving cars and shared robotaxis, and it promoted the carmaker’s (now struggling) solar panel business. The robots on wheels haven’t shown up yet—though Wednesday’s events did include a cameo from Optimus, a still-clunky prototype of a humanoid robot also being built by Tesla.
Cars were made with lights and doors that were used in holiday shows. It came up with dog mode (a climate control system that stays running for dogs in a parked car), a GPS-linked air suspension that remembers where the speed bumps are and raises the car automatically, and “fart mode” (where the car makes fart sounds).
You would if not for the party-killers at Ford. Ford thwarted Mr. Musk’s “SEXY” gambit by preventing Tesla from naming its small sedan the Model E, since that sounds a bit too much like a certain famous Ford, the Model T. If you venerate Musk and the company, Model 3 is either a serious joke or it ruins it. I count myself as a former admirer of Mr. Musk and Tesla, and in fact put a deposit on a Model 3 after my first drive of one.
But the more I dealt with Tesla as a reporter — this was before Mr. Musk fired all the P.R. people who worked there — the more skeptical I became. Any time I spoke to anyone at Tesla, there was a sense that they were terrified to say the wrong thing, or anything at all. I wanted to know the horsepower of the Model 3 I was driving, and the result was like one of those oblique Mafia conversations where nothing’s stated explicitly, in case the Feds are listening. I said that I had read that this car has over 200hp, and the person from the company replied, “I wouldn’t disagree with that.” This is not how healthy, functional companies answer simple factual questions.
