Ultimately Tesla, like Apple, is a fashion brand. Once you've established your brand to the upper class, thereby causing the middle class to covet your product in order to signal a higher social status, the actual product that you make doesn't especially matter. Tesla is happy to forfeit the low-end EV market to other automakers just like Apple is happy to forfeit the low-end phone market to Android: low-end products are forced to compete on scale and become commodities with low margins, whereas fashion products can command much higher margins, and the existence of low-end competitors only serves to further cement your fashion brand as upper-class.