Some things to keep in mind:
People are very good at believing what they want to believe.
People want to believe that the status quo will continue, and that we are not desecrating the planet.
A lot of people believe, with all their being, that there is a god who ordains all things and will continue to provide us with oil.
People are slow to accept change.
EVs require a change in the way we think about transportation, and for the present at least, batteries are expensive and place limitations on EVs in terms of price, range, and time to "re-fuel."
A lot of people have a very contradictory and inconsistent view of science: On the one hand, they mistrust the pronouncements of scientists regarding the environmental effects of our behavior, but on the other hand they regard science as a kind of magic that can solve any problem. Thus they deny climate change, but absolutely believe that science will provide us a way to continue to drive our present cars.
Take all this together, and they do not believe that electric cars can work. The June 22 roll-out of a few tens of Model S, and even this year's delivery of a few thousand, will not flip their opinions like turning over a card. It will be a gradual acceptance, as they first recognize that an EV is not a golf cart, and then that it can have decent range, and then much more slowly they'll come to accept that they don't need TWO gas cars, and as prices very slowly fall and charge time very slowly declines, and charging infrastructure is gradually built up, there will be a gradual acceptance of Tesla's ability to succeed as a profitable company, ideally poised to be the leader in the field.
And as these realizations gradually take hold, the market will gradually value TSLA higher. There may at some point this year or next be a short squeeze, but short squeezes are by their nature brief spikes, good for profit taking, but useless to the long-term investor.
Tesla will grow and TSLA will rise, but it will be slowly, over the course of years, and will continue to be very volatile for a long time. And the gradual acceptance is not a bad thing, because Tesla will take time to increase production. If 10% of the population decided today that they wanted an S, Tesla could not meet the demand. Demand and production will grow together as early adopters provide cash flow and more EVs on the roads spur acceptance. Maybe in a decade TSLA will be 5 to 10 times its present value, adjusted for inflation.
Or maybe we'll trash the planet so badly that in a decade Mad Max will look like an optimistic vision.
