I architect chips like this for a living, though in a different business. I've lived through pissing off every possible customer in the world because we couldn't immediately scale by a factor of 10 or 100, and couldn't deliver product on time. I've lived through having that attempt to scale completely disrupt the development of new products, causing delivery of new product to be years late.
It's not a stretch to assume that a similar thing could happen to ME.
It's not a stretch to assume that their current architecture has hit a wall, and can't be simply extended to meet the new customer requirements. In such a case, the next generation gets delayed while architecture starts over from a fresh sheet of paper.
Such a situation could certainly lead to what we see here - more-or-less a mutual parting of the ways. ME recognizes that they can't meet Tesla's new customer requirements, and Tesla recognizing the same. The two would simply be incapable of reaching agreement on delivery, and the relationship would be over.
It's also easy to imagine that, assuming a limited design capability, ME would have to make a decision on what they'd spend their design resources on. Should they bet their company on supporting a niche player in the market with a great name and great prospects, or should they bet their company on the entire rest of the market whose shipments two years from now will be 200 times that of the glamorous company?
Not all situations have Machiavellian maneuverings behind the scenes; sometimes your engineers are just tired.
It's not a stretch to assume that a similar thing could happen to ME.
It's not a stretch to assume that their current architecture has hit a wall, and can't be simply extended to meet the new customer requirements. In such a case, the next generation gets delayed while architecture starts over from a fresh sheet of paper.
Such a situation could certainly lead to what we see here - more-or-less a mutual parting of the ways. ME recognizes that they can't meet Tesla's new customer requirements, and Tesla recognizing the same. The two would simply be incapable of reaching agreement on delivery, and the relationship would be over.
It's also easy to imagine that, assuming a limited design capability, ME would have to make a decision on what they'd spend their design resources on. Should they bet their company on supporting a niche player in the market with a great name and great prospects, or should they bet their company on the entire rest of the market whose shipments two years from now will be 200 times that of the glamorous company?
Not all situations have Machiavellian maneuverings behind the scenes; sometimes your engineers are just tired.