You know things are getting tight when Tesla is charging extra for paint.
Elon just Tweeted that his flailing – and failing – EV company will be removing obsidian black metallic and silver metallic from its standard color choices.
Elon said the reduced choices would “simplify manufacturing,” but Tesla is under huge pressure to maintain production level of its Model 3 in order to increase revenue and avoid a potential cash crunch. By dropping the colors, Elon can speed up the assembly line.
Musk’s said the two colors would still be available – but only as a “special request” and (of course) at a higher price.”
He did not say how much those colors would cost.
The company’s service centers, which make repairs on cars already sold, will stock the paint colors.
Tesla already charges $1,500 more for some colors, including deep blue metallic, midnight silver metallic, obsidian black metallic and silver metallic. It charges $2,000 more for pearl white multicoat and red multicoat.
Only solid black comes included in the base price.
. . .
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We uh…we don’t often hear from car companies about embarrassing cutbacks like these do we? It just feels like overshare which makes it that much more awkward to even think about Tesla.
He’s as bad as the kind of people who talk about how they’re writing a book. And more and more time goes by and they talk about the book and meanwhile in reality there’s no book getting written. If you’re doing a thing then you’re doing it. What’s with all the boundary-pushing tweeting?
Does the Musk-ito think he’s Henry Ford? They can have any color they want as long as it’s black.
But Henry brought a practical car to market designed to free the working man. Elon seeks to bring an impractical car to market to rob the working man. Ford fought the powers that be over the Selden patent, Elon seeks to cozy up TPTB to use fraud and force to steal tax money by use of government. Musk, baby, you’re no Henry Ford.
Audi has (had in 2013) just 4 base colors: Black, red, white and grey. All the others were 3 grand more. Chrysler didn’t charge me any extra for specific paint colors, and had a lot less orange peel too.
Fine for a luxury brand. But if TSLA wants to compete on the volume markets they’d better figure out how to price this stuff in. How hard is it to figure out an average price for all the paint colors and charge accordingly?
Pay extra for something they are having problems with anyway…… What car company can’t figure out paint? Well, Tesla can’t.
https://autoweek.com/article/green-cars/paint-issues-causing-tesla-model-3-bottlenecks-elon-musk-admits
Even car companies near the “bottom” quality wise produce cars with great paint jobs. In fact a great paint job on a new car is now the norm, even on a “cheap” one, as paint quality has probably never been better then now.