While traditional car makers can catch-up relatively quickly on some fronts with big budgets, they'll still miss the boat in terms of what makes Tesla so appealing - innovation and progress pushed forward by the company rather than the market is a huge sell.

Musk respected Jobs and his accomplishments at Apple for a simple reason: "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

Big auto is reactionary, and until that changes, nothing will change (for them).