I think Tesla messed up the messaging for sure. But they tend to do things like this...their timelines are always off. I've seen many Model S owners get around 300 miles of range with the LR but I can understand wanting 500+ miles of range if you drive at Autobahn speeds or at speeds greater than 80mph often. The last model LR at 400 miles EPA was tested at 320 miles from C&D but thats at only 75mph consistently. If you drive at 85mph, you'll drag the 400 miles down to 250 miles i'm sure.

To get around 180 miles from the M3P, you need to average around ~350 wh/mi from a 80% battery (80 kwh / .35 kwh/mi * 80% Capacity). I average this amount when I'm doing about 85-90mph on the highway in the M3P. If I'm doing 80mph, I get about 300-325 kwh or roughly 200 miles or better at 80%.

If you go to the Tesla forums, many of the enthusiasts ordered the Plaid+ and my guess is that they couldn't supply both the Roadster and Plaid+ with the amount of 4680 they could produce at Fremont which is only a prototyping fab. They've been promising the Roadster for 4 years now so I'm guessing the Plaid+ may have eaten all of their supply. Lets see what they've improved in the non-4680 version of the new Model S and see if the battery tech has also improved from the previous version. I'm hoping they made some noticeable improvements.

 

That line of reasoning makes sense with a company like Toyota, but I don't think you can make any generalizations about how things work at Tesla.
We'll never know for sure, but it seems there were plenty of people waiting on Plaid+, and "it's fast enough already" is the most un-Elon statement ever. If I was to speculate, they simply don't have the 4680 supply coming to support all these vehicles in the short term and as a result they want to push people into Plaid that are waiting on +. I actually think the demand problem is with Plaid, if anything, because people are sitting on + reservations.

 

I don't think Plaid has a demand problem. They have plenty of orders and it will take them awhile to fullfill. The Plaid+ with the 4680 battery pack will be a huge engineering project for them overall. Its not like you can just bolt on the 4680 pack into a skateboard design and call it done. The 4680 was designed from the ground up to be part of a structural battery pack that is a part of the car. In essence, its a completely different chassis than the current Plaid model and does it make sense for the Fremont factory to dedicate a line to build that low volume car? The Austin plant is currently being tooled for a Model Y with completely different manufacturing process for their Model Y as its using the Gigapress and will use 4680 cells instead of the current skateboard. They will also build the Cybertruck that also has a structural battery pack.

If Fremont builds any 4680 cells, probably makes sense to build the Roadster as that is low production but a halo car for Tesla. If this cancellation of the Plaid+ means Roadster is out early, then I think its a good decision.

 

yes, i think tesla might get the attention of the FTC (and SEC) for their behavior.

because the announcements (and order taking!) when it was the best thing ever could have negative effects on competitors, but now they've canceled it.

 

holy rationalizations batman. if doing 4680 for S is so hard, how will it be any easier for Y or 3 or Cybertruck?

early as in 4 years late?

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As has been said before, Tesla is more of a tech company than a car company and a lot of their customers just seem to have more forgiveness for some of these issues than a typical car buyer and their customers will defend them to no end regardless of what they do “wrong” in the typical sense of the word.

Would this fly for a normal car company? Absolutely not as it would be embarrassing and owners wouldn’t be happy but Tesla owners are a loyal bunch so it doesn’t matter what Tesla says or does.

 

I'm not rationalizing. This is what i've been hearing on the Tesla blogs. The Model Y is being redesigned with the new Gigapress for Austin (which Tesla made public). The 3 will not get the 4680 and will remain in Fremont with their current design. Cybertruck has always been slated for the 4680 (Tesla made this public). Google is your friend..you can look this up easily.

Model S will remain in Fremont and no one knows anything about Roadster and where it will be manufactured. Could be that Roadster heads to Austin as its Elon stated it will have the new structural battery pack but its conceivable they build low volume models in Fremont? Both of these have been speculated on the blogs. I agree that Roadster is very late but they are resource constrained as a small company. You seem to want to nitpick every single thing they do which is easy because they make a lot of mistakes as a small company. Its all noise to me as long as they are headed in the right direction, I'm happy as a shareholder.

 

a company with 71,000 employees and a market cap of $570Bn is not small.

 

In your expert opinion what should Tesla have done differently to make the + a reality?
VW has 665,000 employees.

.....I double checked but is that right? Volkswagen employees a heck of a lot of people.

 

ha, no expert but i'd say they simply shouldn't have announced it until it was closer to reality. also smacks of desperate stock manipulation (again).

 

That arguments pretty ignorant and pretty out of context. It's a fraction of what other automakers have at their disposal. They are slight bigger than Mazda which has 50k employees. 71k also has a bunch of service center employees and store front employees which no other manufacturer has. Their R&D and design teams are much smaller than traditional auto. Hey also employ a ton of software engineers and solar employees. Overall, they are very limited resource wise and have to selectively choose their priorities.

 

Why is Tesla desperately trying to manipulate their stock?

 

you said they're a small company. they may be a small automaker relatively, agreed. i have no doubt they're limited resource-wise given the extreme and almost endless goals and announcements from saint elon.

 

Elon is a nutcase but I'm happy he is running Tesla. Tesla is better with him than without him and i've already bet with my wallet. Again, nitpick all you want but many visionaries don't do the optimal and obvious thing but it turns out better in the long run.

 

Much better to aim low and do nothing, that's who you admire. You going to answer why Tesla is desperate to stock manipulate?