When leadership sees numbers going in the wrong direction, they squeeze everywhere they can. Often this means making poor long term or poor engineering decisions in hopes they can squeeze some short term gain.
What I see, from decades of being an engineer, is a company making a bad decision probably to cut costs. Why would Tesla need to cut costs? Something isn't working out correctly.
There's no evidence that Tesla has a unit cost problem. If anything the opposite is true. Tesla has significantly higher automotive margins than all mainstream competitors, despite producing 100% EVs with large expensive lithium battery packs. While their competitors mostly produce mature, highly cost optimised ICE vehicles.
The result is that Tesla has insane amounts of cash on hand and record-breaking profits, despite rapidly constructing/expanding three factories on three continents.
It's not the unit cost that's the problem. The unit cost decrease is a patch that can buy time to address eg an engineering cost problem, or a "we're going to need to buy bigger chips soon to get this to work" problem.
They certainly aren't losing on being a money making enterprise, before or after this change.
Or did you mean w.r.t. having autonomous cars? I don't see how adding more work will buy runway...