Selling a few high end car (Porsche) and selling a mass-market car (VW, Ford) are vastly different businesses. Boutique style pampering you get today when buying a Tesla does not scale, or at least not easily. For example, online buying, Tesla shop, even the SuperCharger network would need to scale dramatically.
They could do it, like Apple. But with this news and the opening of their patent sooner, I'm just wondering if they are not simply giving up on the mass market leaving it to generalist brands like Toyota, VW, ... IMO that would not be so bad, they risk to devaluate their brand significantly in the mass market if they fuck up there and fucking up there has a not much to do with technology. ( after all, brand like Toyota have Lexus counterpart just for the purpose of splitting luxury from mass market )
Tesla's idea of mass market is somewhat different. They're talking about selling 500,000 units per year of the Model 3. That's huge for them, an order of magnitude increase over their current sales, but tiny compared to bigger car manufacturers.
I don't think they want to leave it to generalist brands, but they also recognize that they can't go it alone. Musk wants (or says he wants) to drive EV adoption above all else, and the Model 3 is as much about getting others to follow suit as it is about Tesla's growth.
Regarding the cost savings, a lot of it is supposed to come from the gigantic battery factory they've started building in Nevada. Batteries are still really expensive, which is why every cheap electric car has crappy range. If they can meet their price projections for batteries from the new factory, that will make up a big chunk of the difference in price right there.
s/specialist/generalist. Unless you are using a different definition for those words, I don't know why you would call Toyota a specialist brand relative to Tesla.
Somewhat, brain went straight to "brand specialising in mass market" which was already incorrect but still understandable. Unfortunately I also wanted to avoid repeating "mass market" hence the shortening.
"Specialising in $0"=="someone with expertise in $0" is wired in my brain without any validation of $0.
From what I can gather, their waiting list for the Model S is ~3 months. So it seems as though they are sitting pretty close to the sweet spot on the price/demand chart.
There's no point in them making lower priced widgets until they can drastically scale up their production capacity (which is what they're trying to do with the Gigafactory, etc.).
I really doubt Tesla will deliver any mass market car and by that I mean a car starting under 40k. They already are over reliant on California subsidizing them through pollution credits, effectively having other automakers keep them in business. However that will fall off quickly as the other companies sell sufficient cars to get out from under that law.
Selling niche cars to rich people isn't exactly a challenge. Many of the other big makers could sell the same car but don't need to as they have established track records. The difficulty of breaking into the market was being able to differentiate yourself enough from existing marquees and it took an all electric to do that.
They could do it, like Apple. But with this news and the opening of their patent sooner, I'm just wondering if they are not simply giving up on the mass market leaving it to generalist brands like Toyota, VW, ... IMO that would not be so bad, they risk to devaluate their brand significantly in the mass market if they fuck up there and fucking up there has a not much to do with technology. ( after all, brand like Toyota have Lexus counterpart just for the purpose of splitting luxury from mass market )
edit: as suggested s/specialist/generalist.