Today seems like another bad day. Many here (including myself) have posted multiple times that if demand was an issue Tesla would pull leasing as a demand lever. Well, we are here. Further, margin compression seems to be continuing. I just spec'd a fully loaded P3D, red paint, white interior, FSD, etc. It was $71,000, today its $67,500. Yet another $3500 price drop. They have bundled AP at a 1k discount (yes its all margin), they have reduced M3 paint prices by $500, etc. To my eyes the skies look quite dark indeed.
Not to mention this doesn't make new M3 Tesla buyers feel great. Every person that has bought a M3 up to this point now feels as though they would have gotten a better deal had they held off on their purchase. My neighbor has two LR model 3s that I sold him on. I spoke with him last week and he told me how much he loved his cars, but that the price drops plus all of the bad press made him feel as though he may have made a mistake. He did talk in glowing terms about Tesla coming to his home to solve a couple of minor issues and was generally positive otherwise.
I understand this post will likely be met with comments ranging from "well what do you expect cars go down in value and technology makes things cheaper, to lowering the price helps the mission" etc etc. But the reality is we aren't producing cars at the rate necessary to give us remotely ideal margins. Demand is clearly a very real issue, and while we are facing these headwinds the company is being forced to slash Model 3 prices, offer leases and heavily discount the flagship models.
Please, someone, anyone, point me in the direction of something I can hang my hat on to stay invested in this company. Something that will resonate with a rational mind. Not TT007 style pipe dreams and speculation ala leased M3s becoming FSD taxi's someday. Maybe this will happen, but not in the near term.
You literally post nothing but negativity. If you do indeed have an investment in Tesla stock, you should sell it because you obviously do not understand the economics of Tesla's business nor do you understand the auto industry(if you did, you would understand that the entire auto industry is heavily driven by leasing) To say that demand is an issue when 2 weeks ago they were only offering high end model in Euro and China and had not started any volume production on SR for US, it just misleading and I definitely question your motives here on this message board. What absurd expectations do you have for the Model 3? That they'll sell 250-300k a year world wide with only the LR, AWD, and P versions? Really? Really? Are you really not able to understand that the majority of the Model 3 reservations are for the low end variants because the size of the market for that price range is 5x higher than the high end variants?
You act like Tesla is acting out of desperation while they've been sticking to the plan they've been saying which is introduce high end for a quarter and then start introducing low end variants. You have absolutely no idea of the margin of the SR+. You're fearmongering on this board. There were bogus articles about how Model margin would drop in Q4 because of the mid-range variant and guess what...it didn't.
As someone above me mentioned, you're cherry picking things such as the price drop the in P Model 3. You intentionally selected the items that Tesla adjusted while completely ignoring that the lowest model increased on the website. I take it you don't understand the economics of it's better to drop the price of a high end model and sacrifice a tiny bit of margin to create larger profits by selling more of the P versions?
