Hi, Unk --That is certainly part of it. My underlying logic is the present day adoptions demographics of BEV's, not hybrids. Much of the global acceleration of BEV's has been coming from Chinese growth, including ones like Volvo, Polestar and BMW iX3 although they are not directly a major factor.
In the rest of the world the shift is not visible in gross numbers, but is in the incentives numbers as I previously mentioned, and in the actual sales prices. Model mix has shifted in material ways, but at the moment that is rarely directly disclosed.
That shift is the one that affected Tesla more than any other, primarily because the Tesla Marketing,( including Positioning, Placement, Price and Promotion [this year mostly Advertising] changed so abruptly. The net effect of all the Marketing alterations was to shift what had been regarded as a premium and aspirational brand to one that was devoted to mass market commodity Placement and Positioning.
All of that coincided with the economic and cultural shift that essentially everyone sees. When combined all that sent shares spinning down, public perception shifting negative, all exacerbated by the emotional issues so widely dispersed by FUD and the Social Media Issue.
I have tried to avoid the comprehensive Marketing subject because so many people equate general Advertising with Marketing, and now even formerly tightly targeted social media has generic advertising growing exponentially much to the surprise of nearly everyone. For that we can credit (blame) Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and a handful of others but perhaps the first to do that was pinkfong of BabyShark fame:
In the world of Marketing, global influences end out of major consequence.Pinkfong Official Website
Pinkfong develops creative, animated content to provide stimulating and fun learning experiences to children worldwide.www.pinkfong.com
That single event ended out fomenting the entire idea of ignoring segmentation but target a generation instead. Of course that has been common for decades, but not in social media. Social media without targeting si the motherlode for Meta and Alphabet which now generate substantial revenue without targeting other that at the grossest level.
Amazon, by contrast has shifted markets towards corporate products but continue highly segmented pricing and service strategies.
Tesla, unlike other companies with similar product classes including cars, large scale energy, and services for competitors has been adept in treating each class independently, a wise choice, and treating automotive as a carefully orchestrated Positioning exercise comparable to, say, Airstream, Gulfstream and LVMH but few others. Having discarded that approach, we end out with confusion and dismay.
My earlier post was trying to illustrate the conflicts and challenges that happened during the last years. Without question my unstated Giant Issue is China. As a tiny illustration, Brazilian imports of cars from China rose over 600% last year, and industrial/commercial BESS there is now nearly 100% Chinese.
Elon Musk is now taking the steps that might just fix all that, and he's quite correct, in my opinion, to be 'Hard Core' about it. The question is what happens in 2025.
That is part of the detail behind th overall issues I was trying to show.
All that is closely related to how to make a business success of Optimus and Robotaxi. neither will be like 'a walk in the park'.
I found that pretty dense and in some places hard to follow -- not a criticism of you, of course! The fault is no doubt mine. I'm going to try to an, "In my own words" thing to see if I'm getting the gist.
> That shift is the one that affected Tesla more than any other, primarily because the Tesla Marketing,( including Positioning, Placement, Price and Promotion [this year mostly Advertising] changed so abruptly.
I think this means price cuts? The cars didn't change (much),, Tesla doesn't advertise (much) , as result of the prior, positioning couldn't have changed (much), which leaves us with price. Mmm .. let me walk that back a little bit. Are you including Musk's overall Twitter messaging as part of "positioning"? Also, Tesla's market position changed due competitive forces in the market, most notably in China.
WRT to pricing -- There is, as you know, a huge debate about this. I honestly don't think Tesla had much choice in the matter. A look at Troy's backlog charts shows that they were runrating some 1MM orders/year in the back half of 2022, which you just have to do something about immediately, and pricing was the only tool available.
> Elon Musk is now taking the steps that might just fix all that, and he's quite correct, in my opinion, to be 'Hard Core' about it.
But I don't see that Musk is at the moment doing anything to address the challenges you allude to. Instead, he seems to be (to use a Muskism) going balls to wall on autonomy. I guess this could be considered "addressing" to the extent that success there would render matters of product, price, placement, etc., for the current fleet moot,
Yours,
RP
