BYD took the global EV crown. Now Chinese rivals and local startups are taking over emerging markets.
- Tesla’s sales are dropping globally, with political headwinds and fierce EV rivals throwing up challenges.
- New frontiers beckon, but Tesla faces a showdown with savvy local and Chinese competitors vying for dominance.
- Pricing battles and rapid innovation are putting Tesla to the test, demanding a strategic jolt to regain its edge.
I’ll say it happen when Musk got involved with production as he thought he will disrupt manufacturing by heavily relying in automation, disregarding what every manufacturing expert had told him that it ain’t that easy.
He fumbled the ball hard and IMO that was the beginning of the end of Tesla’s hegemony, where they started making serious quality mistakes and dropped finishing quality as well.
That said, I’m not sure if they ever had any to begin with, but for a while customers valued that brand very highly, even being on waiting lists for months.
To me, this was the Jets’ Butt Fumble of car manufacturing.
Even before Musk got involved, the “disrupting car manufacturing” idea was there, and Tesla had already reversed course and was recruiting experienced auto-industry production engineers. Turns out all those “why don’t we just?” questions from the tech bros had already been tried in the car industry 40 years ago, and had almost all failed.
Cars are complex gadgets with nasty supply-chain issues, and design for manufacturability and maintainability aren’t the first things someone thinks of when trying to roll out a long list of new features.