[ithilglin909]

By “Tesla Doubters” do you only mean people who don’t believe it’s a viable auto manufacturer? It seems pretty clear that it’s a viable auto manufacturer -- as in it manufactures and sells a significant number of vehicles. But I think many reasonable people have serious doubts/concerns about some of the issues with the vehicles themselves and leadership and future of the company.

[thisone]

indeed.

I buy cars for longevity. I expect them to be able to last me at least 10 years if not 15.

Tesla doesn't have that track record yet. And is there anywhere to get them serviced other than dedicated dealers? It's a lot of money to potentially be lighting on fire when other fine, reliable vehicles are available.

And, yeah, Musk concerns me since he seems like he is Tesla. If he takes down the company...

I see no upside to a Tesla other than the cache of 'I own a Tesla'

[Jtsummers]

The Model S is now over 6 years old so we still have a few years to hit your time benchmark.

My bigger concern is that Tesla's manufacturing has been repeating the mistakes of the American auto industry from the 1970s which nearly doomed them. Poor quality control, high rates of rework from defects discovered at the end of production. This keeps the per vehicle cost too high to be sustainable against more effective competition.

These are, at this point, well-understood principles of project/production management that they just don't seem to understand. I'm invested in them (already sold off a chunk of my stake), and I don't plan to sell the remainder any time soon. But I have only middling confidence in them over the next several years. They have to learn how to run a Lean production environment if they really want to take over. Otherwise, Toyota or Honda or someone else will flip a factory to all-electric production one day and wreck Tesla.