It’s not cheaper, but rather high quality at a somewhat lower MSRP. More affordable based on lower cost battery technology and mass market appeal. Elon expected around 60,000 Model 3 Reservations and too his surprise 200,000 rolled in within a couple days and currently stands at 400-500,000 units. The glitch is supplier parts and scaling production numbers to a level that went well beyond his expectation. If it’s production hell, it’s good that it’s a high demand production hell, based on a proven market, rather than production hell based on delivering a few thousand pre-orders with no proven market acceptance, followed by little market demand for a new class of vehicle.More FUD to chew on:
One thing to remember is this. Tesla has been building complete cars since 2012 (I won't count the original roadster). They had around 5 years of building cars and SUV's. Now they are going into a cheaper and higher volume unit. With that, they are struggling. It shows that when you try to make something cheaper on a larger scale, it's not as easy as it looks, even though they have vehicle manufacturing experience.
With that being said, if Elio does get to production in 2019, I'd suspect they will be having a hard time just like Tesla and most likely, a harder time. This is because Elio has no manufacturing experience of building cars, plus they have to build a brand new engine too. This will be the first shot at it and they will have 65K customers chomping at the bit to get theirs. I suspect we will have people that will be around #1K in their SIL and be waiting 6+ months before their number comes up.
Just like Elon, Paul will be in manufacturing hell for a while and probably much deeper for a longer period of time.