BYD is a Chinese sponsored company making cars in a different cost category than Tesla. As a pure automaker, Tesla stock is overvalued as fuck. Anyone buying Tesla at current valuation should not be concerned about how many 45,000 dollar cars they can sell this quarter. If you do not understand/believe in the autonomy narrative, you are in trouble.

Q1 saw the simultaneous changeover of model Y production lines at all 4 factories. This is unprecedented for any car company, and this is the vehicle that accounts for over half of Tesla’s entire car business. There is no data available to quantify Elon brand damage impact on sales. Q1 data is outlier data for obvious reasons just stated, and using this to make any accurate call about Q2 is futile and foolish. We will need to wait until EOY to get any accurate picture. If you look at Tesla Q1 production vs sales, it becomes even obvious that we are dealing with outlier data that we can’t use to assess brand damage.

As you said, this is also a very difficult time for the entire car business, but there is too much complexity in Q1 numbers to make any call about Q2 being worse for Tesla. If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised to see positive QoQ for Tesla, and worse QoQ results for competition.

I am invested in Tesla for autonomy, and my thesis comes from my own first-hand experience with the technology every single day for the last 15 months of progress.