AP Images / Mark Lennihan
- Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised profitability, vehicle deliveries, and more to his shareholders, customers, and employees over the years.
- Not all of his visions have panned out.
- The electric automaker’s wider-than-expected quarterly loss this week and profitability forecast highlight Musk’s pattern of issuing expectations that end up needing adjustment.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a visionary.
He’s accelerated the rate of electric vehicle adoption across the world, while also exploring Mars and digging tunnels.
But the billionaire also has a habit of over-promising and under-delivering.
For Tesla skeptics, those ambitious targets that don’t always get met on time are proof enough that Musk is a fraud. Yet for some of the company’s staunchest supporters, the same execution is just proof he’s a genius at work who can’t be confined to traditional metrics.
"Sell-side analysts who don’t know the guy, who don’t understand the technology, who don’t understand what it is like to work at Tesla — they translate his ‘shot for the moon’ as ‘they missed it,’" Pierre Ferragu of New Street Research, easily Tesla’s biggest Wall Street bull for years, told Business Insider last year.
"Instead of translating it as ‘they started,’ they translate that into ‘they failed,’ which is a massive mistake. It’s just a wrong way of translating Elon Musk."
Here are eight of Musk’s pledges that have yet to reach their fully promised potential:
In 2013, Musk said that all of Tesla’s Supercharger stations would be equipped with solar panels within a few years. That hasn’t happened.
Aaron Bernstein / Reuters
Musk said in 2013 that, within a few years, all of Tesla’s Supercharger stations would be equipped with solar panels and battery packs. He said the process was still underway in 2017.
Tesla has not yet announced the completion of this project, and it made no mention of solar power when it unveiled the latest version of its Supercharger stations in March.
In 2015, Musk said "I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years." He has pushed that timeline back to 2019.
Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press
Musk told Fortune in 2015 that he believed Tesla vehicles would be able to drive without human assistance in around two years. He has pushed that timeline back to the end of 2019.
Musk in 2016 said Tesla would produce 500,000 vehicles in 2018. Tesla made 254,530 vehicles during 2018.
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
In its first-quarter earnings letter in 2016, Tesla said it planned to make 500,000 vehicles in 2018.
"Given the demand for Model 3, we have decided to advance our 500,000 total unit build plan (combined for Model S, Model X, and Model 3) to 2018, two years earlier than previously planned," the company said.
Tesla made 254,530 vehicles during 2018.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
See Also:
- Tesla posted one of its worst quarters in years, but one analyst says there’s still a way Elon Musk can get the company back on track
- Elon Musk said now is ‘probably’ around the right time to raise capital
- Tesla just reported an abysmal quarter with Model S and Model X sales falling off a cliff
Source: Business Insider – grapier@businessinsider.com (Graham Rapier)