Tesla to raise prices and keep more stores open

This is a company in absolute turmoil.<p>How can a company go from closing almost all their stores, to reversing that decision in a week. How was that initial decision made in the first place? Was it Elon Musk snapping his fingers like Thanos? And then to turn it around in less than week shows a complete misread of the situation. Whoever made that initial decision should be fired, including Elon Musk.<p>I think Elon Musk has great vision, but he is in over his head with running and growing the company. He needs to hand the reins over to something who is better at this than he is. His behavior, including calling a person a pedophile, tweeting about going private, and fighting the SEC over Twitter shows a person who is mentally unfit to be a CEO. This last decision really cements it, and the company, employees and shareholders could truly suffer going forward if he continues as CEO.

Getting to test drive all three current models, I can say that the actual test drive was what convinced me to start looking at purchasing a Tesla and making compromises&#x2F;adjustments in my life (charging stations, range, etc). No amount of marketing can give you the thrill that you get when you slam the accelerator.

They should never had cut the prices to begin with. For a company in need of cash I don&#x27;t understand the fascination with the price cuts. There is demand sufficient to keep them going and with the TMY coming it should open a new market.<p>The S&amp;X price cuts are only warranted if they don&#x27;t plan to bring their interiors up to par. The TM3 price confusion seemed mostly caused by their change up in how auto pilot and full self driving were sold. With enhanced auto pilot being removed for a lesser version and FSD taking some features from EAP. Even at the new two thousand dollar price for FSD presented to existing EAP owners I wonder what the take rate is. They haven&#x27;t shown significant improvement.<p>My concern long term with Tesla is that they still don&#x27;t have up to date features for the driver other than &quot;autopilot&quot; and that feature is quickly becoming the norm for many cars. Their blue tooth support is half baked, you cannot select music from your phone through the car&#x27;s UI, you have to use the phone. Automatic wipers and high beams are both sporadic with the latter being near useless. The promised voice commands never arrived. Their energy monitoring screen is the least useful of all EVs.<p>They are quickly turning into a two trick pony in a world where everyone else has their own stable.

Are they doing their math on a napkin? I don&#x27;t understand why they make such dramatic spins on pricing and cost in less than a month.<p>Either they have real-time data that supports the rationale of changing the model based on revenue predictions or they financial math is a joke.<p>I&#x27;m inclined to think is the latter, simply because I really doubt they have any early indicators to compare physical floor vs online performance. But if they do, then this means that their early online performance is way way lower than they expected, which is troubling by itself.

Again, follow the SilverCar model and let consumers rent a Tesla.<p>Apply a one day rental fee toward the purchase price if they buy within 365 days of renting the car.<p>Use this to get more people in Tesla’s experiencing them.

Well I&#x27;ll give them credit for being able to recognize and reverse a mistake. That&#x27;s a good sign for the future.<p>The original plan was pretty much a death sentence for them, it&#x27;s impossible to compete seriously without giving people an opportunity to actually see and drive the product.

Would hate to be an employee working for a Tesla dealership. Closing, not closing, but maybe closing. If they don&#x27;t already, I&#x27;d expect most employees to have one foot out the door.<p>Fortunately for Tesla, there is a bit of a cult surrounding their brand so maybe up-and-comer type salesmen might stick around for the &quot;prestige&quot; of working at a Tesla dealer?

&gt; <i>The company says it has a &quot;generous return policy&quot; to avoid the need for test drives, as would-be buyers can return a car after 1,000 miles or seven days.</i><p>I wouldn&#x27;t define it &quot;generous&quot;, if I cannot test-drive the car.<p>Concerning the rest: mmhh, the move seems suspicious after the previous statement, which was very clear =&gt; maybe the early in&#x2F;direct feedbacks&#x2F;indicators were more negative than expected, and&#x2F;or the stock market did not react according to the expectations and&#x2F;or etc..., therefore the mgmt decided to find some middle ground? And&#x2F;or maybe some conflicts in the board of directors?

I&#x27;m worried about whether or not Tesla will still be a company in 5 years. I think I would love to have a model S, but not having confidence in whether or not if be able to get it serviced is a huge impediment.

I am a huge Tesla fan and a Model S owner for almost 3 years. I love my car and think Tesla makes the best 21st century car, period. But, I have lost all faith on Elon at this point. These decisions and his hubris (like Falcon wing doors or Model 3 line automation) is actually costing the company at this time. Tesla needs a Tim Cook type operator to just take advantage of the car platform and stabilize the company, rake in the profits, and build a long term sustainable company. The innovations going forward mostly need to be incremental.

My thoughts on this aren&#x27;t really about Elon or media coverage, though I think all sides have valid points. My thoughts are that Tesla lowering prices overall was a bit strange to begin with. Not many were calling for a price reduction in model s and x. Everyone wanted the 35k model 3 because that was what was promised. So by lowering the prices of all 3, they had to close stores. Bad move IMO. Relying on online sales is putting faith in a change in consumer behavior. When i buy a new car, sure I look for the car online first but I NEVER buy a car without a full physical inspection. That would be bananas in my world. So keeping stores open is smart. Keeping the savings for just model 3 is smart. Increasing the prices of s and x back up to what they were is smart. Reversing recent decisions makes me nervous but at least I get why they&#x27;re doing it.<p>On a second note, from friends of mine who work there I hear that this kind of &#x27;change of heart&#x27; manuevering is common from top to bottom. They&#x27;ll be working on a project and then a decision will be made, often without warning and often because it&#x27;s what manager think Elon wants, and they&#x27;ll spend hours in overtime transitioning to the new regime. In one case I was told about, they refactored their codebase to a different language in a week and a half only to be told to refractor to yet another language half way through. They are always stressed that whatever they&#x27;re working on is going to be scrapped at any moment. Not sure if anyone else has had this experience where they work but i have not.

Closing the stores made me, potential customer, worry about whether Tesla the company will be around, spare parts will be available, software I am entrusting my families life to will be debugged promptly. Can parts of their business cease to exist on a whim from The Mad King?<p>Reversing their decision hasn&#x27;t made me worry less.

I suspect a good number of those stores are already in strategic locations, compared to other major car manufacturer locations which are all around major cities, I can think of at least several places I can get Toyota &#x2F; Lexus cars in my city. For Tesla in my city I can only find one location and it&#x27;s 58 minutes away from where I live. Let&#x27;s see, I can drive 15 minutes or less to try out a Toyota, Lexus, and other cars from other manufacturers, or I can drive an hour to try a Tesla, worse yet if I <i>can&#x27;t</i> even test drive one, how will I know I want one? This would be a problem if they closed up enough Tesla locations.

I&#x27;m a little disappointed they&#x27;re reversing but it feels to me like they&#x27;re still playing with it. They&#x27;re making almost all sales go online still so most of the benefits of their previous approach are still there. They&#x27;re also not going to be carrying much inventory in store so it will presumably it will be cheaper than most dealerships. However, with the stores now serving such a small purpose, I do wonder if there&#x27;s not a better model. Ah well.

I prefer second hand cars because it hardly matters when they get a small bump or scratch in the tiny weeny supermarket car parking spaces.<p>I also prefer the price.