I think their strategy is to charge the highest prices they can, early adopters pay up, demand gets exhausted and they have to keep the illusion alive that supply is the growth constraint, not demand. Demand falling is a death knell for them so that is one thing they absolutely must avoid at all costs.
They want people to believe that the demand is a foregone conclusion and they need to build more factories to satisfy it. But clearly they are trying to maximize the profit. Of course they would like to lower their costs in pursuit of that but it’s not to charge the least they can, otherwise they’d have led with a compact EV instead of an $80k luxury sedan.
I’m struggling to understand what insight you think you are providing.
Tesla had a very explicit plan for a long time to make high margin luxury cars and keep scaling up production to make cheaper and cheaper cars to make electric cars dominate.
Lowering prices isn’t some sign of “struggling to hold on”.
The insight is that they may intentionally be propagating the "supply limited" story despite it not being true. I believed it (while thinking "but why? the chinese seem to have none of these problems").
They are lowering prices because demand is falling off. And it's not just one price reduction. They have done multiple at this point. It's one of the worst positions for a company to be in.
Lowering their cost makes Tesla in a position to lower they prices if they want to. Lowering prices because the demand is low is OK if you have better margin then you competitors and as far as I can tell they are making more money per car. Its natural that they decrease prices to sell more. But as long as they are making money on each car and is taking more and more market share I think they are happy.
They want people to believe that the demand is a foregone conclusion and they need to build more factories to satisfy it. But clearly they are trying to maximize the profit. Of course they would like to lower their costs in pursuit of that but it’s not to charge the least they can, otherwise they’d have led with a compact EV instead of an $80k luxury sedan.