I believe there will be a raft of new long range BEVs coming from Jaguar, Audi, Mercedes, and others. The Jaguar is in pre-production and being built by Magna in Austria who also built the Ford Focus Electric and Energi models. The issue is that they are looking to build something like 13,000 in the first year, which doesn't move the needle all that much. But it will carve a nice niche for a Model Y-like vehicle. Tesla does need competition ... it makes Tesla better and it improves the overall ecosystem. These automakers will be building in the low tens of thousands while Tesla is looking at hundreds of thousands. Such low volumes makes their cost structure for EV components much more difficult to overcome. But they do need the emissions credits or average, so they can also afford to lose money on each one on a gross margin basis.
The problem that I see is that it does not appear that any companies are taking this as seriously as Tesla. Without a massive battery supply that is focused on lower the cost and improving the quality (cycle rates, durability, safety, longevity), then they are destined for failure. I did some searching around today and I found 3-4 articles on companies expanding or building new battery factories and the most I think they where investing was something like $500 Mil. I think LG was going from 10,000 cars of capacity to 30,000 cars by 2018. Maybe combined they all add up to one Gigafactory, but because they are not working as one unit, the costs per KWh are much higher then Tesla. This got me thinking, Panasonic is making 100,000 cars worth of cells today and that capacity will go somewhere starting next year when Tesla converts to 2170 from the Gigafactory. That's a start, but those cells as we know are 30+% more expensive then Tesla's flagship 2170s. How much are companies willing to lose to catch up and does that really help them catch up if they arent planning on building their own battery factories?
I dont understand emissions credits that much, but it seems to me that everyone is at least making a compliance car, which would remove any credits from the market. I guess if there are new markets coming and there are higher requirements or there is some anticipation that there will be, I think I side with Tesla when they say they are mouse nuts, ever shrinking mouse nuts.
I could car companies loosing money for a while, but at some point, someone has to start building 100GWh factories because you need one for about every 1-1.5 million cars/trucks/vans or whatever else is out there. Some 20 cars are coming by the magical year of 2020, but there is absolutely no battery factories to supply those and only Tesla is building out the capacity and talking about more capacity, on the order of 3-4x more. I would expect to see article and article of Samsung, Panasonic, LG and others building new factories on the order of 1B-5B, but it just doesn't seem to be happening. Its really dumbfounding. There arnt enough mouse nuts to go around to save these autos.
