this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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I think so. As I understand it, Tesla have produced to order before. Every car off the line went directly to a customer.
There is nothing wrong with a logistical strategy of pushing products to market (without a demand). It's a reasonable way to be able to push the price down. And I believe that is what Tesla wants to do? Tesla is not supposed to be a luxury brand
Why would anyone want to intentionally produce more than the current demand which lowers prices and therefore profit?
Unless you mean they produce more to lower their own costs, which I doubt would really be the case here.
One of the problems with the automaking industry is that there's a lot of stuff where you buy a very expensive machine and have a very expensive setup for said expensive machine (molds, templates, whatnot) and then the cost for almost everything else (materials, person-hours, etc) is lost in the noise.
Scaling up and down a car assembly line is hard so an automaker really wants to plan this out really really well such that the design is done at exactly the right time for the big switchover, you have a constant staffing level for the line, all of the machines are working roughly at their optimum capacity, and you've got enough spare cars so everybody can go to the lot and get a car of their choice fast enough to satisfy whatever impulse caused them to want a new one.
So I guess mayyyyybe possibly they are working to get ahead of the seasonality of car buying but I'm betting that what really happened is that they screwed up their planning, possibly because some chunk of the potential buying population doesn't want a Tesla anymore.
Like an X-factor, would you say?