The Verge 2017 tech report card: Tesla
It was supposed to be Tesla's year for delivering big on Elon Musk’s ambitious vision: the mainstream electric car known as the Model 3. And at the beginning of 2017, things looked great from the outside. But instead of delivering, 2017 was a year where Tesla stalled on that promise, and in the end was forced to buy itself more time with the strength of its brand and the promises of its CEO.
Tesla entered the year with around half a million preorders for the Model 3, each worth $1,000. Musk had promised in 2016 that the car would be at “production capability” by July 1st of this year — a date he called “impossible” to meet. In the end, Musk missed by a week. He tweeted a photo of the first Model 3 to come off the company’s production...