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Comment by tajen | Hacker News Reader

And Tesla even affords the attitude to say they don't want to claim the whole market and they're happy to let others use their ideas, because they want a world with fewer carbon. So, even if they don't win, they can claim it was their plan all along ;)

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Tesla and Elon Musk are not the same entity. Tesla is controlled by a board of directors unlike SpaceX it's a public company. Elon Musk took the reign because he had the vision, if his ideals will eventually come to an impasse with Tesla's financial future he can be just as easily removed. Tesla opening its patents and IP was more than just sharing it was a brilliant move to prevent a future patent war in the EV space that could put Tesla at risk by claims brought forth by the car behemoths, now it's much easier to claim previous work. A single company cannot corner the market and its unrealistic for Tesla to have 50% or more of the EV market in the long term but if you think they are OK with just packing it up and going home as long as some one else picks up the tortch you really do not understand how companies work. If anything it looks like Tesla wants to evolve into being a service provider in the automotive space, batteries, charging networks, auto-pilot tech and many other technical solutions on top of having a production line. Heck I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla drops car production completely in 10 or so years if they can corner the battery manufacturing and automotive charging market.

The traditional car companies will catch up with them (Apple was 5 years ahead of the competition at the time of the iPhone too for example), but by then Tesla will have over 50% of the world's battery production, and guess what all electric cars need? Batteries, and lots of them, and they will need to be replaced every 7-10 years.

Tesla right now does pretty well as a car manufacturer and the Model 3 will probably do well too, but by 2025 when the established car companies (like the German ones) have caught up, unless Tesla innovated far beyond those, it'll be a marginal car company - but a huge battery and energy company, as well as a "fuel" company with their supercharger networks.

> but by then Tesla will have over 50% of the world's battery production

I'm not sure whether you are referring to control or consumption, but in case it's the former: the cells Tesla uses are produced by Panasonic, so technically, they would be in control.

> unless Tesla innovated far beyond those, it'll be a marginal car company

You mean just like Apple became a marginal tech company?

I find it fascinating how people make bold claims here in the comments, predicting the future like this...

>Apple was 5 years ahead of the competition at the time of the iPhone too for example

A highly doubtful statement. At the time Apple released it, there were smartphonese capable of steamrolling over and over, just nobody sold them in US

First video of Elon I saw was him saying that. He said that if Tesla fail because others do it better as a result, then that's still worth while.

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