Elon Musk’s tweets earlier in the week had sparked an industry-wide guessing game over the electric automaker's big surprise.
Elon Musk at a Boring Company tunnel unveiling in California in December. By Drew Harwell Drew Harwell National technology reporter covering artificial intelligence Email Bio Follow February 28 at 5:25 PM A Tesla electric car that mainstream drivers can afford has finally arrived, Elon Musk’s automaker said Thursday, achieving a long-delayed promise that could help propel the upstart automaker into the American middle-class garage.
The cost-cutting and mass layoffs, however, show how the company has not fully moved past the financial doubts that have dogged its early years as an upstart automaker. Musk said that he wished “there was some other way” to offer the car at a lower price without layoffs and that the company did not expect to make a profit this quarter. Tesla stock fell about 3 percent in after-hours trading.
“Worldwide, the only way to buy a Tesla will be online, and you can buy a car on your phone in 1 minute,” Musk said Thursday. “It’s 2019, people want to buy things online." But once the car began rolling off the Tesla factory line in summer 2017, its manufacturing was marred by months of what Musk famously labeled “production hell." Delays from the Tesla factory’s over-reliance on finicky robots, among other woes, dramatically limited how many cars could be made and threw the company into financial limbo.
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