However, in the long term, I think that Tesla is doing the right things to essentially close the gap with ICE (Internal Combution Engine) vehicles, in terms of upfront cost, as well as guarantee the ability to scale production of batteries for several million EV being produced worldwide in a few years.
Electric vehicles are a feature. There is no moat protecting Musk from competition, and GM/Ford/VW have the manufacturing prowess to annihilate his margins in the open market.
It's all about manufacturing, and Tesla is not a world leading manufacturer at all. They've missed countless self-imposed production targets meanwhile the car companies that they're competing against regularly produce anywhere from 1,000% to 10,000% more cars.
What's to stop GM & Ford from adopting electric and dominating Tesla? Nothing, and this is already in motion.
A smooth UI on Tesla's dashboard screens is not a moat.
Agree with many of your points. But dashboards are horrendous. Too many people making decisions leads to kitchen sink design.
There might be a moat around Tesla in that sense. Big companies tend to do things by committee, and it shows.
Go and look at Sandy Munro breakdown of the cars. He literally was the head engineer at Ford and has worked with every car company in the world.
He believes that Tesla is great at manufacturing and he has detailed data to prove it. Tesla produces efficiently at high margin and they are consistently improving manufacturing.
One example is his analysis of pack cost,$156/kWh on the Model 3 in 2017. His recent breakdown of Model Y shows $108/kWh. And that is for US manufactured cars, its cheaper in China.
Nobody else gets numbers like this.
> They've missed countless self-imposed production targets meanwhile the car companies that they're competing against regularly produce anywhere from 1,000% to 10,000% more cars.
They other companies are producing ICE cars that have been scaled for 100 years and have access capacity in the supply chain.
For 2019:
> Among EV manufacturers, Tesla continued as market leader in 2019, with 370,000 units sold globally, for a market share of about 16 percent, up from 12 percent in 2018
For 2020 they improved this further:
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/08/03/tesla-19-of-global-plug...
While in 2020 Tesla made more money then everybody else, everybody else was dropping billions.
Tesla has been increasing market share in the EV market year after year. When literally everybody predicted their market share would collapse once competition finally got started.
And many of the competition are selling small battery city vehicles, compliance vehicles and defiantly don't make profit on them.
> What's to stop GM & Ford from adopting electric and dominating Tesla? Nothing, and this is already in motion.
So they could do it, but they don't because they don't feel like it? You argument is literally that they don't want to? They don't want to have a high evaluation and have the prime position in the electrification revolution? That is really a terrible argument.
Check out this analysis:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-emissions-suvs-insi...
Or look at what GM plans in for the Lyric, it will come out in more then 2 years and not even match a Model Y in performance, price or range. Why is that if its so easy?
There is literally no evidence what so ever that large car companies can simply produce millions of EV when they feel like it. Just do the math, the battery capacity simply doesn't exist on the planet. GM has announced a giga-factory with LG but its not even built yet and it will not reach current Giga Nevada levels for 4-5 years at the least.
Look at VW the largest (or second largest) manufacturer in the world, who promised to put between 50-100 billion into EV, with there most aggressive timelines only hope to match Tesla in a couple of years at the earliest. And that assumes Tesla can't continue to grow at current rates.
Head VW has often said Tesla is the reference and they are going to battle Tesla. He is not talking about GM/Ford, those companies basically only make money from selling Pickups/SUV in the US.
And no other car OEM, has anything even close to the Battery tech Tesla announced. What Tesla plan is better then what CATL, BYD, LG or Panasonic has announced for the next 3 years. Technologies like Tabless, Dry Electrode, Cell-to-Structure are all unique to Tesla and nobody will have them anytime soon.
Thanks for a very insightful and detailed comment. I also watched some of Munro's videos and indeed I had the same take-away that you had.
Time will tell.