Martin Eberhard, former CEO of Tesla, was quoted by The New York Times:
"Cellphones, refrigerators, color TV’s, they didn’t start off by making a low-end product for masses," he said. "They were relatively expensive, for people who could afford it. The companies that sold those products at first, he said, did so “not because they were stupid and they thought the real market was at the high end of the market,’ but because that was how to get production started. His company and others that have tried electric cars, he said, are too small to produce by the tens of thousands anyway.”
And Elon Musk has always maintained that its goal is to create a mass-market electric vehicle that could be as cheap as $20,000 in third-generation cars.
Until 2008 most car sales were done in person, over the phone or via the internet.
Source: The New York Times