I don't buy his Premium vehicle first and small car later.
Then it's a good thing you're not starting your own electric car company. My view is that Tesla has a very smart business plan.
As automobile historians will tell you, the last half century has not been kind to new car companies (Tucker, Bricklin, DeLorean, etc.). It's really hard to get a new car company established. First, the upfront costs are enormous: Design and manufacturing costs alone (not to mention sales and service infrastructure) approach a billion dollars - and all of that needs to be spent before you can sell even 1 car. Thanks to sophisticated computer simulation and the luck of Toyota selling its factory at a firesale price, Tesla will do it for less. For comparison, GM's Volt cost them over a billion.
Since this is your first vehicle, you can't just turn the switch and start producing 100 high quality cars off the line a day. That means you can't make your profits in volume, you have to make it by margin. That means you need more profit per vehicle, which means a higher price, which means you have to have a vehicle that's worth the higher price to your customers. Also, being low volume means you don't have to spend as much on advertising, nor on high pressure salesmen, nor on a robust service network. Tesla runs their own sales distribution, so they get to keep the traditional "dealer markup" as profit for themselves. Pretty smart all the way around.
Tesla has the further complication of utilizing a new, costly technology. But, what's smart about "Premium first" is that Tesla can include the costlier technology (mostly in the form of big batteries) at little or not profit, and make their money on the high margin luxury items instead. As Tesla refines its designs, the technology will cost less, and then they can make money on the low cost, more mainstream, cars. The tradeoffs that Nissan and BMW are making with their lower priced cars will limit not only sales, but profits. Nissan can afford to do that, like Toyota did with the Prius for almost a decade, but a startup company like Tesla can't.
