Tesla is a company credited for making massive advancements in technology and being one of the first car companies to exclusively offer electric cars. If you live in California this is most likely a company you have heard of and probably see a lot of things that this is a California-based company. Tesla was started in Silicon Valley by a group of Engineers that set out to make a fully electric sports car. In 2006 Elon Musk revealed his “Tesla Master Plan” and in 2008 they began production of their first-ever car the Tesla “Roadster”(Business Insider). By 2010 the company was taken public and was well on its way to becoming one of the most successful startup car companies in history. 

Since then Tesla has made a number of advancements including its Autopilot system. But what really sets Tesla apart is its business model. Tesla is a fully electric car company so it is a little bit harder for consumers to adapt to because there are not readily available charging stations like there are for gas stations. A big obstacle for Tesla to overcome in order for their cars to become more mainstream was charging stations, which is one of the items that the company put a lot of funds and focus into providing for their customers. Once Tesla had established these charging stations and made it easy for a consumer to own a Tesla they started to focus more on their sales. Unlike other car companies, Tesla does not have dealerships and franchises, instead, they have stores and a website where they focus on direct factory-to-consumer sales with firm prices. The company now also has other products such as solar panels and at-home charging stations. 

Recently Tesla has been seeing a bigger success than ever. Especially during the pandemic, they have been able to raise their prices multiple times with a month-long waitlist for each of their cars. After Tesla had announced their third-quarter earnings, the stock price shot up and the number of orders for cars had also significantly increased with so much demand for their products and no sign of this is slowing down(Yahoo News).  Tesla has been able to raise their price for the Model Y by almost $10,000 in the last couple of months. 

Another thing that’s really interesting about Tesla as a company is that they have no marketing department(Better Marketing). With the amount of Tesla’s that a person sees on the daily and how many orders and volume that the company is getting it is shocking that they spend nothing on any sort of advertisement. Almost every car company that you have heard of spends hundreds and millions of dollars on advertising every year, so how is it that another extremely successful company is able to make sales at incredible volumes without doing this? The answer to the question is “The Media”. Tesla is constantly making the news with stories about their new models their advancements and interesting events within the company. with so much news Tesla is essentially earning free publicity on The Daily which they’re able to constantly and consistently benefit from.

A student at YLHS has thoughts on the company as well, Anonymous (10) “I think that Tesla is a great company because they are doing so much for innovation in technology”.

Tesla is one of the most successful and New Age companies in history and I think that this is an extremely important thing for people to become educated and understand why it is such an incredible and unique company.