Tesla shuts down Cybertruck production for days at critical time for the company

Pre-Cybertruck, it felt like Tesla cared about a product first, and the memeing was just a cute bit of personality in everything (fart modes, ludicrous speed, etc). After that, it's like _everything_ was about Elon's popularity and whether it was a good product or not was secondary.

Now that the Elon bubble burst (including my own), it's much easier to see the crazy hype bubbles he managed to spin around everything -- a poor self driving system (the hints were there), production quality issues (again, the hints were there), safety problems, etc.

My impression is that SpaceX has mainly kept out of this, but if Tesla starts to really tank I wonder if he'll turn his eyes on using SpaceX for his own ego-massaging needs.

It's likely due to retooling for a planned lower cost trim.

Elektrek mostly writes misleading articles like this.

That PoS is tesla's flagship model? TIL

Any line that's not running nearly 24/7 is underutilized, but retooling can trade some downtime now for a permanent increase in output.

If a manufacturing line goes from three shifts a day to two, that's a significantly larger decrease than taking a few days off per month. Assuming that they're only ruining a single shift, and that the downtime is because they're outpacing demand, this does give us some information about what their utilization is, but even that doesn't tell us how well a product is doing.

Keeping inventories low can decrease some costs and is especially incentivized by some tax regulations, but it requires fast increases in production, which is easiest done by building out more manufacturing capability than is expected.

tl;dr: If you want to know how well a product is doing, look at the sales figures. If you want to read into the strategies the manufacturer is making, scrutinize the assembly line.

What people should keep in mind is the general trajectory of highly influential people who find themselves riding along with this particular POTUS, mainly in that the timespan of these partnerships tends to be pretty short, almost proportionally to the general charisma of the subject, and that once ejected from the center, things tend to get pretty bad pretty fast. Rudy Giuliani is literally breaking down in courtrooms that he can't pay his bills. Clearly Musk won't have that kind of problem but once you get thrown off this particular ride, there's no getting back on.