Yup, he pulls back the curtain and talks about products in the process of development in a far more transparent way than we've seen automobiles talked about in living memory. Yet dresses that up, I suspect purposefully to an extent, in emotionally expiring words using terms of art that maybe people don't quite fully grasp so come away with a distorted impression.
Exactly. I’ve worked in the tech industry my whole life, so maybe I’m just used to preannouncements about technology that don’t always pan out how you thought they would ... It seems second nature to me, but for an institutional investor comparing Elon to, say, Mary Barra, I can see how that would be jolting, odd and seem sketchy. It’s just not the way Big Automotive used to work. But it’s changing, whether the ANALysts like it or not.
What people that weren't following as close maybe didn't realize was that Tesla hadn't built any of them yet when he was talking about that. There literally was not a single production vehicle in existence. They were in the process of putting together what was effectively a hand-built vehicle to be able to do the official EPA testing to confirm the numbers, and the front motors weren't being built en masse yet so there was no realistic way to be confident about how good those actual production parts yields were going to be. They'd had some early quasi-prototype motors done and testing for quite some time, but those were kinda hypothetical production parts. Almost certainly the design had been refined based on finding from that testing, too. So they just go with somewhere in the range of the testing numbers as "we can do at least this good".
Thus also why they pushed out that patch later to provide 5%-8% more peak HP and then much faster charging rates. Because they gathered longterm data from actual production parts so could revise the "we can do at least this good" numbers.
Exactly. Outside of Tesla, I’m most familiar with GM (having owned a bunch of them from old Chevys to modern Caddys).
GM would never announce something not fully baked, production ready, and passed all testing. They just wouldn’t.
I owned a 2013 Cadillac SRX. When it launched, there was a blurb on their webpage about “Never be out of date because CUE is upgradeable” or something like that. Anyway, someone filed a class action lawsuit because a newer Cadillac came out and had CarPlay, which the SRX’s hardware couldn’t do. All because of a throwaway oneliner on a marketing slide.
Either you get the Elon way (try it, shoot big, fail fast, or succeed.)
The lawyers haven’t taken control of Tesla ... yet.
Now, back to P upgrades. Given that no hardware and no field dispatch is needed to upgrade, what would you call a fair price for basically just faster 0-60 times?
