Deciphering Tesla’s lans for a cheaper car demands a Muskology degree
Making sense of Tesla’s manufacturing plans increasingly requires a close study and a grain of salt when listening to Elon Musk describe what’s ahead. The chief executive loves to talk about the future of robot cars and what might come. What was less clear this past week, as profit plunged 55% and the company burned through more than $2 billion in cash in the first quarter, was the company’s near-term product plans—“product" being the boring part of the business where metal is bashed together to make cars sold to people who drive themselves.
Investors had grown increasingly concerned that Musk was losing interest in a cheaper, next-generation EV for the masses. In recent weeks, he appeared to signal that he was overly focused on a robotaxi to be unveiled in August—even though the company has yet to demonstrate it can actually deploy driverless cars like Alphabet’s Waymo. Instead, on Tuesday, Musk tried to assure investors that cheaper cars are in fact coming.
His product road map has even been pulled forward, he said, moving the launch of new models ahead of the second half of 2025, to perhaps as soon as late this year. But those plans weren’t the next-generation vehicle he had conditioned investors to expect—sounding instead like a Frankenstein’s monster of approaches old and new to get something out quickly as U.S. EV sales grow sluggish.
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