Elon Musk's automaker spent much of the last year resorting to some of the same tricks car companies have long used to paper over their problems, signaling that the company that once scrambled to meet demand is now grappling with the supply-and-demand balancing act its older competitors know well.By the end of 2022, the electric-car maker was offering an unprecedented $7,500 discount on its Model 3 and Model Y vehicles — a surefire sign that Tesla needed to move metal before the end of the year, experts said.While the discounts in the US expired at the end of December, Tesla continues to mark down its vehicles in China, the world's biggest auto market."This is a fork-in-the-road year for Tesla that will either lay the groundwork for its next chapter of growth or continue its slide from the top of the perch with Musk leading the way downhill," the Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note earlier this week.Following Tesla's fourth-quarter-delivery results earlier this week, the Deutsche Bank analyst Emmanuel Rosner said he expects price cuts to continue."