Well, this is a tried-and-true technique used to damage competition. I have personally been the subject of such attacks in a prior tech business when our product started to threaten that of one particular multinational.

What did they do? They had sales people go to every single dealer to communicate they were going to show a next-generation product at the next major trade-show. This was six months away.

What happened? Anyone who was on the fence and could wait, decided to wait. We had a major order (about $2.5 million in product) go on what I call "soft hold" because of this. Soft hold is when your customer waffles around instead of pulling the trigger. They want to hedge their bet, so they keep you in the loop and dangle a big order while they think it through or wait for an alternative.

It is hard to say how much money we lost through such a simple technique. Hardware products are very different from software. You have to preload supply pipelines and fill warehouses with components, assemblies and finished product. Your purchasing has to be predictive (a nice to way to say "you have to get good at reading crystal balls"). In some cases you have to make purchasing decisions 10, 12 or 16 weeks before you can ship any product.

As a small company with just a dozen people or so the tsunami they created really hurt us financially. This multinational's marketing budget in our niche was probably larger than our annual revenue. Which meant they could play all kinds of games.

Our product was very good but heavily funded FUD and dirty tactics served to delay revenue and cause financial damage.

Six months later they brought this "next generation" product to the main industry trade show. Of course, people trusted a well-known brand. And they placed orders. Our orders tanked. Some got cancelled. We lost tons of money. We survived, but it was very rough.

We knew their product wasn't good but customers didn't want to believe this. Delivery timeline was something like six months. Which meant we were denied sales and revenue for at least a year.

As product started to ship and now customers started to use it in the wild the reviews came in: The product was crap. Not good. Not usable. Overpriced. Not worth it. In other words, exactly what we told our customers a year earlier.

The problem at that point we had suffered so much financial damage that we simply could not spin things back up. And, to boot, this was at a time when money had dried up, which means there was no way to find a loan or an investor to get us healthy again to make a run for the market.

The end result was that this company played the market masterfully with a bullshit product, future promises and bad delivery yet succeeded to destroy it's main competitor. I think it was another year before they actually delivered a product people wanted. We were done. They won. Lesson learned.

I can't say with any degree of certainty Tesla is playing a similar game but announcing something that is two years away with a reservation date just a few months from now sure brings back painful memories.

Cars are a displacement market. This means that when someone buys a car that buyer is, generally speaking, no-longer in the market for another car. Whoever sold them that car effectively displaced that opportunity away from any other seller.

Promising something two years away and locking people in with a deposit is most-definitely a displacement move of the first order. That person will not buy another car and will wait two years to get their pre-order. Which means Tesla pre-displaces, BMW, Toyota, Audi and anyone else who might have a $35K-ish car in two years.

Brilliant, if you can pull it of.

Slimy? Sure. Business is war.