Americans have a poor understanding of what’s going on with Teslas sales numbers because their market largely lacks the competition that exists elsewhere and so they overindex on lesser factors like Elon.

The real issue is simply that Tesla are attempting to maintain their pricing and margins while the cost of producing EVs is plummeting and the variety of options is increasing.

The result is that they are being severely undercut on price by BYD et al.

Tesla are going to have to either start cutting prices significantly, or accept being a low volume pseudo-premium offering.