HaulingAss
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Let's think about this from a deeper level. Because sometimes blowback is worth it (if it gets you where you want to go). As a real world example of what I'm talking about that is only tangentially related to the topic at hand:
Imagine if Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and the other leaders of the day would have said, "We should just tell England what they want to hear. Announcing our independence will entail all kinds of blowback." Granted, this does not prove Elon took the correct path, all it shows is that sometimes blowback is worth declaring things that might not come to pass or that might cause blowback. Taking the safe way out is not necessarily the best course of action in all instances.
I want to be clear that I'm not saying that announcing the lowest possible prices was the best thing to do, simply that avoiding blowback is not necessarily the only relevant goal, especially if the company is willing to accept that blowback as a consequence of their actions or statements that may accelerate their path to completing bigger goals.
It's easy to be critical when you are not the one who invested their life savings and most of the last two decades of your sweat and tears to build something better, something that would do meaningful good in the world. Let's look at what leaders of other autocompanies have said, and what the blowback was:
Ford plans $11 billion investment, 40 electrified vehicles by 2022 | Reuters
That's what Ford announced in 2018, just four years before the goals timeline of 2022. How did they do? Here it is a full year after their target goal and they have Mach-e, the Lightning and the Transit. Am I missing any? They were supposed to have over 5 times that many of pure electric models as of 2022. Was it wrong for Ford to set an audacious goal? Where is the blowback?
GM elaborates on electric vehicle plans: 5 crossovers, 2 minivans, 7 SUVs, and more | Electrek
This is what Mary Barra annouced at the end of 2017 as their plans for 2022. Five elecrtic crossovers? Two electric minivans? Seven electric SUV's? Does the Hummer count as an SUV? If so, then they have one electric SUV, not seven, as of the close of 2022. How many electric minivans did GM have in 2022? Did they have five electric crossover SUV's by 2022? Where is the blowback on that? Was it wrong to announce an audacious goal they probably could never achieve?
I won't even get into how much more the Hummer costs (for a lot less capability) and how quickly Ford backed away from the low prices they announced for the Lightning after only selling a few handfuls. Why don't we see press articles critical of that?
Sometimes you set big goals to light a fire under the people who have to make it have to make it happen. That's what an effective leader does. Probably the biggest threat of the Cybertruck development was potential project bloat and development expenses spiraling out of control. By reminding the Cybertruck team that the Cybertruck had to be affordable, he was encouraging them to develop it without huge, unsustainable budgets. Too many projects like this just grow and grow in size, scope and expense, until there is no realistic way it could ever be put into production.
Until you run your own auto company it's difficult to understand how hard it is to bring new models to market, especially one as radically different as the clean-slate design that is the Cybertruck. The fact that it's actually here, only 4 years and 93 days after the start of development, is nothing short of a huge win. This was a task of incomprehensible size, with all odds against the team. How they did it is unknown, but I don't believe the low target price goal hurt them, if anything it helped. And when you are investing billions of dollars on a project with a very uncertain future you want all the help you can get.
Elon Musk does not have a long history of accomplishing audacious goals because he plays it safe, he succeeds because he's willing to take big risks, to push people to do things that many say is impossible.
When you, and I mean you, are the longest running CEO of any automaker in the world, the one with the most experience and the longest track record of success of any sitting CEO, then you can play it safe and show Elon the proper way to run an auto company. Until then, he's the one that that is winning this battle for the betterment of humanity, not you. You can give your opinion on how you think Elon should run the company but guess who I put more credibility in? It's about 1,000,000 to one in favor of Elon vs. you. And I mean no offense by that, it's just the way it is.
Sometimes everything is not as simple as it appears. Blowback is something Elon regularly takes for the decisions he makes, and he expects blowback. As long as those decisions keep making Tesla the fastest growing and most successful auto company of the face of the planet, I'm not going to tell him I know a better way. Because I'm smart enough to know that I don't! I'm not saying he never makes mistakes, everyone does. But I'm smart enough to know that I don't know what they are.
The proof is in the pudding. The fastest growing auto company, at least in the western world, and the company with the best-selling car in the world. It's not just luck that no other car in the world outsells the Model Y. Elon knows what he's doing, it's not luck. He does what works. If that means setting audacious goals they may not hit, so be it.
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