Tesla Lets Old Age Get the Best of Its Most Expensive Models

Tesla’s last few years have been remarkable on several fronts. The company built and sold far more electric vehicles than other manufacturers with just a handful of models. Not only that, it kept growing volume without substantially redesigning those models every five to seven years, evading common practice that carmakers have observed for decades.

The incumbents would ditch this convention if they could — reengineering architectures and retooling plants to assemble new-look vehicles costs billions. The trouble is, models that go without this investment for long tend to grow stale and tail off on the sales charts.