[GeertB]

Their goal is absolutely to drive down cost. Right now they're battery-constrained, so it would not make sense to sell them to third parties. If Tesla can only sell a given number of cars, it makes financial sense to sell them at a higher price. The extra revenue serves to build more factories and grow faster. As production keeps scaling, average selling prices will keep going down. If they'd attempted to start with a $25K car, they'd producing no cars today.

[cvhashim]

I view them as the iPhone of cars right now. And thats by design. Maybe if they take away all the bells and whistles and just ship out a barebones electric car for regular people, it might get mass adoption.