Yeah, the completely unrealistic timeline, price point, and the fact that the company is only now looking to hire engineers sets off my "fun looking product that will never be available for sale" alarms. I don't think they even have a prototype built yet, everything you see is just a render. They have not even started planning how to start building the factory.

The price point is assuming the R&D is already paid off, the factory is built, the supply lines are optimized, and they're building a million of these things every year. History has shown that you can't start off with a cheap mass produced car as your only product because mass production requires way too much startup capital. The success stories started with hand built extremely expensive cars that were used to pay down R&D costs and keep the company afloat while they built the factory for the mass production model.

About the only way I see this happening is if Bezos goes all in and dumps an outrageous amount of money into getting the production line running knowing that he won't see a return for at least a decade or more, and I don't think he's quite that generous. Also this assumes that cheap lightweight powerful batteries become widely available in the next couple of years.

If they could produce 100,000 of these instantaneously and sell at a 20K price point they'd sell all of them before the end of tomorrow and they'd immediately go out of business because they would be about a billion dollars in the hole, at a minimum.

Not to mention that it's actually more like a $30,000 vehicle because the headline is pre-pricing in rebates.