The major German marques often seem to be investing in shared platforms for next generation models that support combustion and electric drive options, but it strikes me that a platform for a combustion based car has to support a ton of things the electric one often doesn't - combustion engines have typically needed much larger/complex gear boxes and drive train in general, plus all the big firewalls needed to keep engine fires out of the cabin and so on. A purely electric car company like Tesla can presumably build out its platform technology without having to worry about a lot of these things. I'd guess you can even build more cabin space for a vehicle of the same size and so on thanks to eliminating many of them. I wonder if shared platforms can leave in otherwise artificial constraints on the electric version for compatibility reasons?