Under increasing pressure from new competition, Tesla spent the past year slashing the average price of its models by roughly 25%. The Model 3 fell from $48,000 to $44,380. The luxury Model S, meanwhile, plunged from a high of $130,000 to $96,380. The cars, as they say, have been priced to move.

It's an unusual business strategy, to put it mildly. "I can't think of another point in the history of automotive when a brand that wasn't going out of business cut prices 20% a year," Mark Schirmer, the director of communications at the research firm Cox Automotive, told me. Tesla is hoping that lower prices will drive up sales and slow the advance of the company's rivals — maybe even scare some of them out of the market altogether.