Is Tesla on the road to irrelevance?

Over the past 18 months, Tesla has missed its sales goals and seen its share price fall, as Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk makes dramatic decisions about the company’s future. Musk cut the price of Tesla cars, fired much of the team behind its Supercharger network, and hinted that Tesla will pursue a robotaxi to position itself as more of an AI company than an automaker.

All of those decisions seem to reflect Tesla moving away from its original mission of making affordable mass-market EVs. The carmaker “needs a growth story,” Bloomberg Opinion columnist Liam Denning says on this week’s episode of the Zero podcast. “And that growth story has just become less and less credible.”

When it comes to the EV transition, though, how important is Tesla? The company is valued above $500 billion, and plays an outsized role in the US electric car market. But in the global EV market, Tesla is one of many players; last year it was surpassed by China’s BYD Co. as the world’s biggest manufacturer of electric vehicles.

This week on Zero, Denning joins Akshat Rathi to talk about Tesla’s strategic priorities, how they’re evolving, and what that evolution might mean for global EV adoption. Listen to the full episode and learn more about Zero here. Subscribe on Apple or Spotify to stay on top of new episodes.