Well it’s true, the response to Tesla Battery Day is a mixed bag of cats and we are all trying to see what we should make of it (just not in the culinary sense). It has been more than a week now, I have gone through the technologies, gone through the numbers, and have come to the following conclusion: what Tesla has presented to us is exactly what we had hoped for and were expecting.
For a few years now, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been briefly, occasionally, and somewhat mysteriously mentioning a potential low-cost Tesla vehicle that would have a starting price significantly below the starting price of the Tesla Model 3.
At Tesla’s 2020 Annual Shareholder Meeting today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk discussed several matters we’ve written about in recent weeks and months. I will revisit a few of those highlights in a moment. First, though, there was one comment that the Tesla-oriented writers on our team here at CleanTechnica world headquarters thought was new. Elon noted that Giga Shanghai (Tesla’s factory in Shanghai, China) could eventually produce 1 million vehicles a year.
In this article, I’m going to discuss an idea I came up for Tesla to dramatically increase demand for their cars after I watched a certain YouTube video and did some more research. Let’s start with the video.
When it comes to affordability, Tesla has come a long way but still has a bit further to go. It will get there, I believe, but it will require more hard work, persistence, and faith. Just this month Tesla announced that you can lease a Model Y for $499 a month. That is still a high price for a car for most Americans, let alone most people of the world.
I thought about titling this article “Tesla Model 2, What The World Needs,” but I thought that would sound too authoritarian, so instead, I’ll focus on my perception of what the world wants out of a less expensive Tesla.
The Tesla story is fascinating. Whether you love the company or hate it, it is easy to get pulled into the story like you’re pulled into a good movie. This is surely one reason so many people so obsessively check for Tesla news and op-eds every day.
As I disclose in my bio, I do own some Tesla stock in one of my investment trusts. I own the stock because I believe the company is a promising avenue of speculation, with a lot of risk and a lot of potential reward.
