It's starting to look like Tesla has turned a corner on its latest crisis

Tesla has endured an epic crisis with its Model 3 vehicle, but the stock price has held up.
Tesla has spent its entire 15-year existence lurching from crisis to crisis, always recovering.
As the company starts to move clear of the Model 3 crisis, bearish investors are going to have to difficult time supporting their thesis about the company.
They may have to wait for the next crisis to strike.

Tesla builds all-electric automobiles, but it also manufactures two other things: stock-price volatility and business crisis.

The company is 15 years old, but these patterns have never changed and aren't likely to anytime soon. The original Roadster — Tesla's first vehicle — was the product of a management crisis, back when then-investor Elon Musk took over as CEO and displaced founder Martin Eberhard.

Tesla almost went bankrupt in the year before the financial crisis, rescued only by an 11th-hour funding round, along with a Department of Energy loan and stakes from Toyota and Daimler.

Tesla's first purpose-built car went through its own crisis, a problematic early production process as Tesla learned how to make cars.

The Model X SUV brought "production hell" into Musk's vocabulary; he later admitted that the car was hubristic and massively over-designed.

The theoretically mass-market Model 3 should have been much easier, but it's created the biggest crisis of all as Tesla has serially botched its manufacturing process, falling well short of Musk's production targets and once again overthinking the manufacturing aspect by trying to heavily automate the vehicle's assembly.

On the stock front, the price can swing $100 up or down in a week. Over the past 12 months, the range has been from $245 to $390.

If you put all this together and try to think it through rationally — and also take into account Tesla's massive appetite for capital — you might reasonably conclude that Tesla is doomed. A titanic number of short-sellers are relentlessly driving home this point, even as the stock shrugs off their dire predictions.

The bulls don't get a pass, either. Musk and Tesla routinely do things to undermine their enthusiasm. The Model 3 is Exhibit A: Why is Tesla having so much trouble building a mid-size sedan, something Toyota has been accomplishing for decades with exactly zero drama?

But as rough as matters have been in Teslaland since the middle of last year, the company has hung in there. It hasn't been pretty, but as we head in the second half of 2018, it now appears as though Tesla has turned a corner on its latest crisis. This just means we should prepare for the next one, so the ongoing war between bulls and bears, long and shorts, isn't going to cool down.

But the company is in better shape than it was six months ago. Here's why.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Insider.

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