I have to disagree, most of the current electric car offerings on the market are more expensive than the base price of the Model 3 (looking at the BMW i3 in Europe, the base price is 45000 dollars).
Tesla is a company that was built from the ground up, without any prior design and manufacturing experience, and they have been mass producing cars for only 5 or 6 years. You can't simply expect them to have the same business agility as BWM, which is a company with over 1 century old.
The lack of "better" product offerings from Tesla is not due to the technology, is due to the infancy of the company.
The base price on the Model 3 today is $49,000 and Tesla's own IR documents state that they don't expect to have a positive gross margin, even at that price point, until some time in the distant future after production is fully ramped up at both Fremont and the Gigafactory. It's not a very good example of the point I think you're trying to make.
They are selling for a loss currently. Any margins from model S and X are being used to subsidise model 3 and overall they are still losing tons of money, profitability not even on the horizon. I wonder how long their current runway is without raising new cash again.
That is mostly right, but I was responding to someone who said that positive gross margins for the vehicle were only planned for the distant future. Their financial statement for last quarter implied that the 3 would have positive gross margins in late 2018.
Their cash position decreased by about 162 million last quarter and they have ~3.3 billion on hand at the end of Q4. There are a lot of risks still out there due to the production bottlenecks that currently exist (and maybe more on the horizon with S and X), but the cashflow situation isn't as horrible as some want to believe.
No the base price is $35,000. They simply haven't started letting anyone buy the $35,000 versions yet. You can say this is a failure on the part of Tesla. But this is not the first time they've had a lower end model that was planned but not immediately available upon production. Case in point when the All Wheel Drive Model S was announced, they didn't make non-performance versions available for several months after.
Tesla is a company that was built from the ground up, without any prior design and manufacturing experience, and they have been mass producing cars for only 5 or 6 years. You can't simply expect them to have the same business agility as BWM, which is a company with over 1 century old.
The lack of "better" product offerings from Tesla is not due to the technology, is due to the infancy of the company.