This is a huge claim from Brad Munchen, an auto industry investor and Tesla bear. This article looks at what we learned at Tesla’s recent investor day. And the first thing that Brad claims he learned – that Tesla’s CFO bends some of the numbers in his presentation.
Beyond that claim, which we’ll let you make up your own mind about, the article unpacks where Tesla sees its future. It has ambitions to deliver 20 million vehicles a year by 2030, which would give it a 25% market share on today’s numbers (in 2022 global vehicle demand was 80 million vehicles). To get there, Tesla plans to spend between $150 billion to $175 billion.
Another aspect of this plan that has Brad raising his eyebrow (remember he is a Tesla bear, so really everything about this plan has his eyebrows raised) is that Tesla doesn’t have a pipeline of new car models in production. Instead, outside of the Cybertruck, they only have two new models scheduled out to 2030. With huge improvements in electric vehicle technology and increasing competition from Chinese and European carmakers, there is a question about whether the existing Model 3, Model X and Model Y will be able to continue competing.
Elon challenges this idea of needing more car models:
“Conventional carmakers are running out of things to do and they’re just reshuffling the deck with all their hundreds of variants, which are mostly not good. They’re just variants for the sake of variants. There used to be hundreds of flip-phone (variants). Now how many do we have?”
Elon has stared down Tesla bears before. Time will tell if he is right again.
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