Some thoughts on recent reporting on Tesla

This is Joseph

One thing that I have not talked a lot about on the blog is Tesla (usually Mark's beat -- Mark is reporting on Tesla on Twitter). Tesla is becoming much bigger news now that a business insider story raises some safety concerns:

Leaked emails from 2012 reveal that Tesla knew its Model S battery had a design flaw that could lead to break downs and fires, but it sold the cars anyway. It's unclear when the design flaw was fixed.

Now, in one way this is quite normal -- cars have manufacturing issues all of the time. What makes this bad is that it is a mission critical component (the battery) and on a very high end vehicle. It's old, but it can be hard to report on a defect without a great inside source. I can think of no faster way to undermine a high end brand then to have failures on key components and the battery is heart of the electric vehicle. I think only the brakes being defective would worry me more, and even then the flammable piece is definitely not ideal.

You need to out-compete vehicles like the Volt, which itself is discontinued. While the Tesla generally scores better than the Volt did, it does so at almost twice the price point the Volt was offered at. The differences in overall size, features, and ratings are not large (and the back-up fuel tank on the Volt is maybe even a plus). So the prestige brand has to bring something to the table and an obvious choice would be reliability. It is not helpful, as Mark has tweeted, that JD Power found Tesla had the lowest quality score among 32 brands.

Here is hoping that more information comes out that makes this look like an outlier and not a common issue with Tesla vehicles.But the idea of Tesla, becoming a luxury electric vehicle car brand, really does depend on getting the key pieces of the top of the market right. At the moment the cars are hard to get (scarcity = good) but at some point you need to successfully scale up unless you plan to remain a niche player. It's an awfully expensive company for a niche . . .

There are some more things to consider about the corporate structure itself (accounting and governance) which may impede Tesla's ability to adapt tho these challenges, but this is probably a separate post topic.