Musk was saying at the start that Tesla was going to be $80k then scale up so they would have a $10k/20k car. It looks like BYD beat them to it. I guess putting manufacturing in China, giving them all of the tricks of the trade, letting them build consolidated supply chains, letting them iterate on every aspect of manufacturing, and automate it all was a mistake in the long run. pikachu_face.jpg

Tesla severely lacks competition in the North American market. They lost all their first mover advantage by sitting back and spending significant R&D into FSD. Chinese manufacturers have some incredible innovations such as Nio’s battery swapping.