My guess is:
1. It's a nerd car
2. A lot of nerds are probably zillionaires from bitcoin
3. So they can collect Tesla gear like Pokemon, as the price doesn't matter
I missed the bitcoin boat, so no meme car for me
CT should not be conflated with their volume sellers, the Y and 3. IIRC the Model Y recently surpassed the Corolla as the world's best selling car (for a month). So I'd argue the "brand" is doing fine. The reason their growth has evaporated is complex and we're familiar with the main reasons:
- China is highly competitive and consumers there are increasingly tilting towards home-grown brands (price matters, as does nationalism)
- Elon's politics are highly offensive to his traditional left coast customers
- BEVs are actually doing well around the world, but are facing headwinds in the U.S. as somehow it's become too "woke" for red state consumers
- Most of their car models are dated, as they don't follow industry norms of complete redesigns roughly every 7 years. They claim continuous improvements but we know this is mostly a lie.
It's hard to not characterize the CT as a bust so far, but we should remember this is just year 1. IF they figure out how to profitably produce them en masse, and IF they lower prices to be competitive, is there a market where they could sell 250k units per year?* That's a lot of IFs, and we really don't know the answer to that question. But the working assumption of 4 years ago that they could sell 400k+ of these things annually (after production scales up) appears to be a pipe dream.
Considering how many Ford and Chevy trucks are sold in the U.S., 250k in annual sales would be considered just a modest success at best.
* IF all that does happen, will your wife sign off on you buying a used CT in four years?