One can perhaps think of this as Teslas blind spot. People living with California wages don’t necessarily see the difference in prices mattering that much.
Musk wrote about this way back in the day (2006):
https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j...
> Almost any new technology initially has high unit cost before it can be optimized and this is no less true for electric cars. The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model.
You might criticize their execution for failing to reach the mass-market sedan price-point fast enough (though I think that they have done an impressive job of starting a car company from scratch), but I don't think the "blind spot" claim really holds water.
It's a good illustration of why software is such a different paradigm than traditional physical economies; VCs can pour funding into a software company and since the marginal costs are close to zero, the innovator can blitz-scale and take over the market before the incumbent has time to react. However when "scaling" means building global logistics infrastructure, including factories for batteries and factories for cars, it's a lot harder to get the drop on the incumbents.
I think the GP's comment is spot on though, if Tesla fails to win this race, they will still have been the driving force in bringing EV adoption forward by 5-10 years (perhaps more), which is an incredible achievement.
https://electrek.co/2020/10/30/tesla-tsla-market-share-globa...
However they are not selling more EVs than everyone else in every market, which isn't a bad thing IMO. A smaller piece of a bigger pie is what they seem to be shooting for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
Part of that 'deduction' pays for heavy tax-breaks and subsidies for electric cars in Norway.
But then GDP is also an abhorrent metric to use for basically anything.
If you use either GDP or 'disposable income' as a proxy metric to compare anything between countries, you should seriously re-evaluate what you're doing.