>>The “flip-flop” on retail strategy, he added, “makes it seem like Musk is winging it and the board is letting him wing it.”
That sounds like a founder who is not afraid to experiment and course correct when necessary to me.
That sounds like a founder who is not afraid to experiment and course correct when necessary to me.
I just think, in 5 years time when they're having to sell to average people, not just Tesla fans, how are they going to compete with everyone else. Is your Mum or Dad going to buy a (new fangled electric) car, on the internet, sight unseen?
Now its still not necessarily a bad decision now to be closing stores they don't need, but is it going to hamper them later?
I'd buy one off the Internet. I bought my current car, a Citroen, off the Internet unseen. It's pretty low risk if you pay deposit with credit card here in the UK.
No didn’t test drive it. Petrol.
Personally I wouldn't buy a car without a test drive, checking the boot fits a pram etc. Doubly so for an EV where things like how the accelerator and brake pedals work are still in flux.
So from our highly scientific study, we can conclude Tesla are cutting themselves off from 50% of the market!
If I don't like a book I can take it to the charity shop and buy a new one, can't really do that with a car.
And if lack of 'test drives' for books did turn out to be a problem, it is at least a trivially solvable problem, technologically speaking.
Plus you might need to add at least 5 years to that date.
It didn't exist in 1995, and wasn't clear if it was needed, just like it isn't clear if test drives are needed for Teslas today.
Books just work. There are no moving parts and unless something has gone really wrong you won't have quality control issues. Also they cost like $20 so any losses are minimal.
Cars are highly complex, require regular servicing, are a once in every 5/10 year purchase and cost $40,000. And they are also highly personal as the driving and interior experience needs to work for just you. It's more akin to asking someone to buy a house online without ever looking inside.
In any business, management needs to "inspect and adapt." Agile businesses do so more frequently. But change is not necessarily inspection and adaptation. It can sometimes be throwing things at the wall and hoping they will stick, without properly evaluating each of the things thrown at the wall.
Inspection and adaptation also works best when done with discipline. Experiments should are conducted with explicit falsifiable conjectures to test.
It may very well be that this course correction is the result of an experiment, and the results have been inspected, and Musk is adapting. or it could be a knee-jerk reaction to cash-flow problems.
I am not disagreeing that this may be a founder courageous enough to try experiments and abandon those that invalidate his conjectures. But I want to point out that drastic changes in and of themselves do not necessarily indicate the presence of "inspect and adapt" management.
Tesla's time between debut and shutdown feels less like an experiment than a bold cost-cutting move. At least with Apple, they knew they had strong product sales before doing dedicated retail. Obviously, Tesla will sell plenty online, but how certain are they of the impact of online-only?