It doesn't seem like Tesla knows how to make it profitable either, to be honest. Their current plan for profitability appears to be the million robo-taxi fleet by 2020 rather than the auto manufacturing business.
What other options do they have? It seems like they lost the bet that they were going to become profitable with the Model 3. Now they need a new big bet, or it all falls down.
They have to stop pretending they are a luxury brand and release a cheap tiny little box with knobs instead of an ipad that will compete with the leaf or any other subcompact. The price is just too high right now, and if they can't get it lower then it sucks that they entered this market too early to benefit from the economies of scale on EV tech that might come years later. Any other automaker has other revenue streams to wait decades even for this to happen, but Tesla has 10 months to live.
> They have to stop pretending they are a luxury brand and release a cheap tiny little box with knobs instead of an ipad that will compete with the leaf or any other subcompact.
Believe it or not, the screens are cheaper. Other companies (most notably Volkswagen) are moving towards entirely digital interiors as well. They cite reasons for it being a better experience despite decades of research pointing out the importance of touch controls while driving to limit distractions, but most people believe it is because they are cheaper to build and service.
But there is no way that they can get the from-scratch design, engineering and production line of yet another model up to capacity in less than a year. And everyone knows this. OTOH, making bets on AI are much harder for investors to evaluate the reasonableness of.
