A lot of powerful people are TERRYFIED of Tesla. The only reason all the other car companies are building electric cars is because of FEAR. Chevy actually losses money on every Bolt they sell. If it wasn't for Tesla nobody except the Chinese would be building cars to lessen climate change. If everybody starts buying electric cars, solar roofs and power walls why to we need oil? I totally understand why it's Tesla against pretty much EVERYBODY else.
There are many reasons other cars companies are resisting making electric cars.
Probably one of the biggest is momentum. Companies build their whole system around delivering whatever their product is. Kodak has been offered up as the biggest example of a company that went bankrupt because the refused to change. That isn't really true.
My father had a direct distributorship with Kodak and was a beta tester for their new products. He had an semi-insider's view into what was going on. Kodak saw what was going to happen and did everything they could to change course, but economically and logistically it wasn't feasible.
Most people are not familiar with the long logistical trail in film photography. Consumers are familiar with buying film and getting back prints, but few really saw the sausage getting made. Making film in the first place is fairly specialized. Kodak employed a large workforce of blind people to make the film because it had to be done in darkness. (Solar panels need to be made in the dark too which I believe is why Solar city chose Buffalo for their factory, there was a population of unemployed, trained, blind factory workers in nearby Rochester). On top of that film processing requires a lot of chemicals. And finally you need special paper to make the prints. There is also a lot of specialized equipment, but Kodak didn't make much of that.
Kodak had a massive investment in manufacturing and support for a whole slew of things that simply went away with digital photography. The need for Kodak supplies with digital photography is around 1-5% what you need for film photography. Kodak had this massive investment in an entire network that needed to die and writing it all off was too much for the company to handle. There was no room left for a Kodak company in the new environment.
Electric cars aren't quite as radical a change as with film to digital, but it's still a very big change. Not only do car companies need to bin whole swaths of engine and transmission tech that they spent billions on, the whole chain related to maintaining those technologies goes away too.
The bean counters in the car companies look at what it's going to cost to switch to electrics between throwing out billions in intellectual property, closing plants to make them, putting mechanics at dealerships out of work, and the costs of designing and gearing up to make EVs, they probably have coronaries. In microcosm it was reported last week Porsche is having some problems retooling their factory to make the Taycan at only 20,000 a year. Electric cars have a completely different parts flow to put together and the industrial engineers need to learn the new ropes.
On top of momentum, there are also die hards who resist change who do everything they can to continue the ICE train.
And finally there is the global economic picture. The entire world economy is structured around oil. In the 1970s the center of gravity for oil production shifted from the US to the Middle East and that disrupted the US economy very badly for a few years. The US has propped up its national debt for the last few decades by having the US dollar closely tied to the price of oil.
We can disentangle that and probably come out stronger for it, but if its done too quickly, it could crash the dollar and send the world's economy into a tail spin.
At least some forward looking politicians want to get the US disentangled from oil. Ultimately it will be better for the US economy, but there are those who don't want the status quo to change, or want to go back to a mythical 1950s where the US directly dominated the world oil market.
People have pointed to the coming of the automobile and how the horse and buggy industry didn't resist it. But first off they were nowhere near as organized or as big as the transportation powers that be are now, and in many cases the horse and buggy makers were among the first car makers.
The use of horses in cities were a major problem at the end of the 19th century. "Tail pipe emisions" actually come from the waste left behind by horses. Horse waste in the streets of major cities was becoming a major problem. Legions of people had to be employed by cities to clean the streets multiple times a day and the urine in the streets was both a bad odor and sanitation problem that could not be removed by guys with shovels.
I've read some stories about the waste problems. Cities like New York had to deal with many tons of waste a day and disposal was falling behind production.
Cars were hailed as the "pollution free" transport alternative. As soon as cars got cheap enough, adoption was very fast.
With the oil economy, it's vast and it does work. The problems are not as obvious as hundreds of tons of horse manure. Electric cars are superior in many ways, but not so blatantly obvious that the FUDsters can sow enough doubt to keep much of the public in the dark.
The world's news is far more Balkanized than anything was at the end of the 19th century. Back in the 19th and most of the 20th century, there were entire regions of the world who experienced a very different world from us, but people living in a given geographic region got pretty similar news to their neighbors and most people lived in the same consensual reality. Today because people can select their news so readily your next door neighbor could be living in an entirely different reality from you.
You may be well educated about electric vehicles and their advantages, but your neighbor may not even be aware you own one and think they are useless toys. I was watching something on YouTube the other day and one of those links in the side bar caught my eye. I watched a bit of it and it was basically a bunch of long form ads for high horsepower ICE. There was one for the Dodge Demon where one of the people from Dodge was talking about all the steps in drag racing the car at the track and through the whole thing I was thinking, "and you take a P100D, punch the go pedal and get almost the same result with none of the other hoo haw..." And you will get a better result with a 2020 Roadster with less fuss. And both the P100D and Roadster can be driven in the rain.
They completely ignored high horsepower EVs. That crowd doesn't want to admit they are driving dinosaurs.
A poll that came out last year found that something like 60% of Americans really don't know anything about electric cars. The legacy car makers don't want people to know about them because if people actually did know what they were capable of, they wouldn't want ICE anymore and then they would be in trouble.
The FUD campaigns against Tesla have taken on a hysterical pitch. The powers that be are scared to death the Model 3 will succeed and then everyone in the car industry but Tesla will be in trouble because the public will want something they can't provide for at least half a decade (in the numbers required).
