Judging by Elon's tweets, they do expect to be able to produce cars for that price in the near future. Whether or not they will sell them near the cost of production probably just depends on demand vs supply.
They've done no such thing. They've made another vehicle to compete with BMW, Audi, and Mercedes. Which is fine, but let's call it what it is. There is no such thing as a $35k Model 3, and it could still be many years before we see one.
Truth is, Tesla sells well. Chevy bolt does not sell that well. And one of the major reason Tesla sells so well (50k model3 at 50k$ in a quarter) is because of the futuristic hype and image. So they will never admit that Tesla makes just another premium car, or that autopilot is just another driver assistance program.
And also, you can't pre-order it - you can put the same deposit down, if you want, as everyone else - that's 1k, and can apply that to a LR/MR and in the future SR.
Also worth noting, the MR and the LR have different inverters, with the MR sharing the same inverter as the SR.
Winter is coming ;-)
At this point, no one is locked in on that deposit. Anyone can cancel at any time - until you click purchase with a additional payment for the car, which is only after the car is available for purchase.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/mid-range-waiting-ro...
Nothing new is ever profitable until you get past the early prototype and scaling stages. For big capital intensive stuff only government historically has pockets deep enough to burn enough money to get big stuff off the ground (sometimes literally). Rockets, jet engines, microprocessors, huge scale power grids, the Internet, genomics, supercomputing, nuclear power, solar power, the list goes on and on.
Private investors just have too low a risk tolerance and too short a time horizon.
I actually wish this weren't so, but it is so.
It's also terribly hypocritical to bash Elon for taking government contracts when everyone does it. Why do you think Amazon's HQ2 is going to be in the DC area?
If EVs weren't tipping we'd still be talking about how peak oil (the depletion of easy/cheap oil) means the end of modern transportation.
Tesla didn't make Musk a billionaire. The PayPal acquisition did that.
Does Tesla even still get subsidies? They got that DOE loan years ago but they paid it back and lots of other auto makers got government loans back then too. Or are you referring to EV tax credits? In that case those are also subsidizing Nissan, BMW, GM, and any other company selling a mass market EV.
The whole point of subsidy is to encourage business in a specific area. It would sound like it's working as intended, encouraging business and all.
Would you be happier if the subsidies were completely wasted on a non-viable business?
If Balmer hadn't studied spectral lines, Planck may not have proposed the quantum. Then Bohr may
not have conceived his model of the atom, which means Heisenberg and Schrödinger wouldn't have
developed their formulations of quantum mechanics. That would have left Bloch without the tools he
needed to understand the nature of conduction in metals, and then how would Schottky have figured
out semiconductors? It's hard to imagine, then, how Bardeen, Brattain, and Schockley would have
developed transistors. And without transistors, Noyce and Kilbey couldn't have produced integrated
circuits.
Almost every major technological advance of the 20th and 21st centuries originated with basic
research that presented no obvious or immediate economic benefit. That means no profit motive, and
hence no reason for the private sector to adequately fund it. Basic research isn't a waste of tax
dollars; it's a more reliable long-term investment than anything else in the Federal government's
portfolio.Solar City, Tesla, The Boring Company, and Space X aren't releasing public research, it's all private IP and manufacturing.
You literally could not benefit from their progress if you wanted to. You'd be sued. Their employees can't even work in related industries due to somewhat spurious non-competes.
you have changed your original comment a few times so it is difficult to respond to, but I'm not sure large tech companies would succeed with unions, people need to educate themselves and learn how to negotiate in highly skilled areas, I look at a local railroad company near me that employs a lot of people and does not invest money in improvements because they cannot afford due to how the union has negotiated, it has stopped innovation entirely. Engineers are still learning light switches, this should be completely automated so we stop having mistakes of train engineers texting people and causing accidents... what a shameful loss of life.
[0] https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
Their progress is not available for public use, period. Go ahead, try to use any technology developed by Tesla and see what happens. They're simply popularizing their own products.
American corporations have done great work convincing you that unions are a bad thing. You're going as far as blaming employees for Tesla-specific safety reporting issues. https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is...
Tesla was not and is not a major automaker. Their market cap may be large but they don't employ all that many people or ship all that many cars (so less people upstream are dependent on them) Tesla was founded in 2008. They would not have been eligible for loans the .gov gave to GM/Chrysler. That would have been like a small town bank asking to be bailed out along with the wall street banks.