In yesterday’s article, Ahu borrowed words from a Weibo reader to refer to Elon Musk as “Ma Bu Ting” and presented a quantum state like Schrödinger’s cat: if the production standards are met, he is like Steve Jobs reborn, but if the production standards are not met, he is like the US version of Jia Yueting.

These days, Elon Musk has encountered many setbacks: the Model 3 is stuck in production hell, the Model X autopilot accident in California has put Autopilot under scrutiny, Tesla’s stock price has taken a hit, and SpaceX’s attempt to recover the fairing has failed… for a moment, there are doubts everywhere, and it feels like we’re back in the make-or-break moment of 2008.

But this morning, in the Tesla owners’ chat group, a group of Model 3 prospective owners were joking and wishing each other a happy second anniversary. Everyone laughed heartily.

It’s moving.

Model 3 prospective owners, you have worked hard.

On March 31, 2016, Tesla released the Model 3, officially launching global reservations. Within 24 hours, it received 180,000 orders with $180 million in deposits. Elon Musk immediately tweeted that the future of electric cars is bright!

A week after its release, Tesla received 400,000 orders from around the world. More importantly, this amazing data made the vast majority of new and old peers aware of the terrible prospects or potential of electric cars, and they began to lay out related areas ahead of time, viewing Tesla as a formidable competitor to be studied and followed.The public WeChat account has numerous followers who have booked the Model 3, with some being the first group of customers to reserve on March 31. During the long wait, every news release from Tesla and Elon quickened their heartbeat. However, the earliest order came from March 28, in which Tesla employees had a priority channel.

Before that, Tesla and its represented electric vehicles were always viewed as a “small trend” in the automotive industry, receiving half-baked praises or criticisms. However, the global effect of the Model 3 after its presale shocked traditional car dealers. Elon Musk’s three-step layout for electric vehicles seems to be true: to conquer the market with an electric vehicle that people can afford.

Today marks exactly two years since the release of the Model 3.

What has Elon Musk achieved during these two years?

Let’s take a look.

1. Announcing the Energy Strategy

In 2016, Tesla’s official website changed from teslamotor.com to tesla.com and revealed the fourth step of the Tesla strategy, which was the Energy Strategy. After successfully acquiring SolarCity in November of that year, this strategy became more tangible. At the same time, they released a new type of solar photovoltaic roof tile, Solar Roof, and Tesla officially transformed into a large-scale sustainable energy product vertical supplier that integrates photovoltaic products, energy storage, electric vehicles, and other businesses.

Elon Musk’s true intention for Tesla began to manifest step by step, which was the layout of the global power grid.

2. Establishing Boring and Neuralink

At the beginning of 2017, Elon Musk suddenly announced that he would be digging tunnels and established Boring Company. This was a specially designed underground tunnel for future electric vehicles, which has already been excavated with an unknown future. Anyway, he promoted his Boring Company’s peripheral items, such as ugly hats and strange flamethrowers, on Twitter to raise funds (I guess), which led to many fans recharging their beliefs.

Furthermore, Elon Musk also established a company called Neuralink specialized in computer and human brain integration technology. This is considered to be his craziest plan by insiders. However, there has been no public progress announced by this company.

3. Exploring Zhongnanhai

Around mid-2017, news about Tesla’s plans to establish a factory in China was rampant, and Elon Musk even visited Zhongnanhai for a meeting. Do you still remember the swirling rumors those few days? Up until now, it was all just a show. It seems that an agreement on shareholding was not reached as Elon Musk also complained about Chinese government policies on Twitter.

4. Model 3 launch and delivery

On July 28th last year, Model 3 was finally launched and delivered. Up to that point, Tesla had gone through a pretty sweet period, with its stock prices skyrocketing and even surpassing that of Ford Motor Company. However, since the launch of Model 3, Elon Musk has acknowledged that Tesla is in deep production hell, with the car’s production capacity becoming a topic, or rather, a problem, that has drawn worldwide attention. After this, Tesla’s days were not as good.

As a side note, up until this point, Elon Musk had a heart-wrenching romance that quickly ended with Amber Heard, Johnny Depp’s ex-wife. During an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, the Iron Man admitted with red eyes that he was still suffering from the pain of the breakup during the Model 3 launch event.

With the release of Model 3, details about the product’s performance, configuration, and employee and old car owners’ perspectives continued to emerge, receiving a lot of positive reviews from the industry. However, Tesla still reported losses every quarter. Nevertheless, it was good to see that the solar energy storage business seemed to be progressing well and continued to perform well financially.

5. Announcing the Mars plan

In September, at the International Astronautical Congress, Elon Musk delivered a speech titled “Making Life Multiplanetary” and announced his Mars plan.

# Space X Plans to Build a Settlement on Mars

Space X plans to build a settlement on Mars from 2022 and transport the first group of settlers to Mars around 2024. The key to realizing this plan is the Big Fuck Rocket, a reusable and refuelable rocket in space that can reduce the cost of sending humans to Mars from $10 billion per person to $200,000 per person.

6, Tesla Semi and Roadster 2 Launch

In November 2017, Elon Musk finally launched the promised electric truck Semi, along with a surprise announcement of the Roadster 2, with a range of 1,000 km and a 0-100 km/h acceleration of 1.9 seconds.

At the same event, Elon Musk also announced the plan for the next generation of electric pickup trucks.

However, after waiting for more than a year, some people gave up on waiting and turned to other models, such as the NIO ES8, BMW i3, or even smaller cars. Meanwhile, some people became small shareholders of Tesla while waiting for the new cars, and the only topics of discussion were production capacity issues and stock prices.

Looking back at the past two years, Elon Musk has been non-stop, from cars, energy, rocket launches, tunnel transportation, to artificial intelligence. It cannot be denied that he is too diverse and versatile.

In addition, in terms of Model 3 production capacity, Elon Musk may have pursued automation too aggressively. The first principles he often speaks of are actually based on theoretical value analysis and reasoning on a deeper level of logic. While this makes sense logically, it may not be achievable in practice.Consider the two years of waiting for four to five hundred thousand car owners. What brand of car can be so willful? And so happy?

On February 8th of this year, with the Falcon Heavy launching Musk’s Roadster into space, everyone was ecstatic. The faith in Tesla reached its peak.

But after the peak, comes the slide.

The goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 cars per week was delayed repeatedly. Even though the red Roadster went to space and Falcon number 9 successfully launched, Model 3 is still stuck in the capacity hell and cannot escape.

Until now, there hasn’t been any uplifting news, and it seems that the climb in production capacity is unusually difficult. The sharp drop in stock price is even more devastating. A series of negative events makes people unable to help but start doubting it.

However, this morning, everyone is still wishing each other happy second anniversary in the group chat. Despite some sadness and helplessness, the foundation is still hopeful.

This is quite a poignant blessing. Let’s use the famous saying that Elon Musk sent into space to end it, “Don’t Panic”.

Happy second anniversary.

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This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.