[HereBeBeasties]

They've achieved a 0.5% increase in production volume in Q2, compared to Q4 2018, to 87,084 vehicles. I'd hardly call that "rapid progress". For comparison, Toyota make around 2.2 million vehicles per quarter.

A more reasonable brand comparison might be Mercedes-Benz Cars, which made 575,639 vehicles in Q2. It's quite impressive that Tesla have got to about 15% the volume that Merc do, but they're hardly going to take over the world with that kind of growth rate.

IMO they should stop chasing volume sales of lower cost vehicles and concentrate on premium vehicles with higher margins. What's the point of killing themselves trying to lift production numbers to try to make all the analysts who seem to be obsessed with that happy, which doesn't yet seem to be working, if the margins aren't worth bothering? It won't end well.

[kevan]

They're not killing themselves with production numbers to make analysts happy, it's literally in the mission statement...

Mission statement: Tesla's mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. [1]

Strategy (paraphrasing): Start with low-volume, high margins. Over time introduce high-volume, low-margin. [2]

[1] https://www.tesla.com/about [2] https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux

[leesec]

yeah but they made only 53k ish vehicles in q2 2018, so your stat is weird. and theyre about to bring online another factory (q1 2020).