Julian, Thanks for the excellent insightful commentary.
I want to zero in on the snippet above. To my simplistic mind the execution risk is very low because all they have to accomplish is to establish one very successful battery line and auto line. Then it becomes merely a task of copy-paste, which any good manager should be able to pull off. Sure there will be some geographic/regulatory subtleties but that is something Tesla can hire for. So execution risk is rather quite low.
Is that the right way to look at it? Do you have more to add?
You basically got it I think. If this was a chess game. Having set up this play Tesla's opponent is in Check. There is no legitimate move on the board for the opponent where Tesla's next move does not put the opponent back in check until the eventual Check Mate or the opponent topples his own King (by joining Tesla in making EVs with better value and lower cost than its own ICE production lines can achieve).
There is one illegitimate move on the board and that's it. The opponent can bribe the umpire to change the rules of the game. However the opponent does not have a semblance of a case to bribe the umpire until he can complain that he's losing badly and by the time he's ready to admit to that, the crowd will have known it for ages and turn on both the opponent and the umpire.
From now on in Tesla either needs to make an unforced error or the bribe to the umpire is unprecedented. I don't think it is actually possible in Western society unless Tesla commits the unforced error of bragging about causing damage rather than continually welcoming competition and permitting the opponent to use his own denial against himself. Which is why I am very happy if the reservation data reveal has now stopped.
@esk8mw
No, I disagree, financial management is not a significant risk factor in the absence of unforced error. Tesla is not obliged in any way to risk overspending its available resources in order to win the game. The customers will wait and there is no competitive threat. This is counter-intuitive, I know because it is an extremely unusual situation in manufacturing and maybe completely unprecedented - except that it isn't. In the auto industry one would have to check back approximately a hundred years. Consumers were keen to abandon the expense and hassle associated with the maintenance and running cost of horses and placed demand pressure on Franchised Dealers vastly exceeding the capacity of Ford to supply - and the dealers cash flowed Ford's growth (which is why they have a valid claim established in law not to be cut out of the loop by Ford once Ford had done growing on their cash - and why they don't have the same claim in the absence of corruption on Tesla because Tesla has never taken a penny from a dealer to promote its brand or grow any part of its operation including its retail business).
Most importantly when looking at the precedents here. There was no pressure on Henry Ford to speculate resources on capturing uncertain demand just as Tesla now is under no such pressure to do so now. The key difference is that Tesla has been willing to leverage surety of demand rather than to become indebted to an inefficient sales and service model that can later enforce an essentially terminal conflict of interest. It is no possible for any OEM to build or operate a business that can compete with Tesla with dealership intermediaries demanding service rent or margins to compensate whenever service rent is lacking.
Just like ICE at the dawn of the Tesla-led EV era. Horses were not going to suddenly stage a come-back and stop needing stable yard operators to maintain them daily and fields of grazing land to refuel them and expensive highway inns for mid journey maintenance and fuelling or to act as even more expensive horse swap stations if you happened to be in a hurry.
Just as then so it is now. Consumers rapidly got the idea that a Model T while it represented greater up-front cost than the sticker price on the most affordable horses, it more than made up for it in welcome new features that a horse could not offer while compromising only a few features that were not particularly useful - like self-replicating and the ability to jump a fence. The most important feature was that the running cost of horses just overwhelmed the up-front sticker price of the car for a better total cost of ownership. Plus you got a nice car to drive for your money rather than splitting your money between the capital value of the horse and excessively so to the favor of load of unscrupulous horse dealers, horse maintenance laborers and horse-fuel retailers while public sensitivity increased to the uncivilized environmental waste products left behind via the horse's tail pipe. It has just taken a while to figure out swapping one tail pipe emitting megatons of visible semi-solid noxious biomas for another emitting megatons semi-visible gaseous noxious fumes of is not actually a complete victory condition for civilization self evident to anyone living in a city which is basically where much of civilization resides.