I normally don't get into the business side of Tesla, in part because there's a bit too much drama some of it of course due to Elon's impulsivity and inability to stay off of Twitter.
But it seems that the fossil-fuel biased mainstream press loves to announce roughly on a monthly basis that there is a 'definite Tesla killer' right around the block. LOL!. It's almost a cottage industry in the press these days to announce that Tesla is in trouble (when haven't they been in trouble?), that Tesla about to go under, or it's about to be overtaken by some mythical electric vehicle rival.
It's all pretty laughable frankly including unfortunately the kind of instability in the public image of Tesla that Elon has to take a large chunk of responsibility for. Musk unfortunately appears to take all the bashing very personally. He shouldn't. It's nothing personal. It's simply that fossil fuels have been the foundation of our civilization and technology for some two hundred years or more, and here comes this upstart out of nowhere who all of a sudden is threatening a critical leg of that dominance responsible for roughly 30% or more of our fossil fuel consumption.
Tesla is simply years ahead of everybody else in relationship to several issues. First of all in terms of the critical Triad of battery, electronics, and integrated operating systems that increasingly form essentially the backbone of any vehicle whether it's internal combustion or electric, Tesla has a really sizable lead. Secondly they have a simply huge if not utterly dominant Head Start in relationship to charging technology and infrastructure, a fact which makes most of the putative Tesla Killers a joke including even the Porsche Taycan. As if that weren't enough, their cars are absolutely a hoot to drive, sit at the top of every NHTSA safety score, and look great to boot. Even Consumer Reports begrudgingly admits the Tesla model 3 has the highest owner-satisfaction scores they've ever seen, besting such iconic Brands as Porsche and Corvette that traditionally have very high user satisfaction. This of course coming from a publication that just un-recommended them due to reliability issues that aren't really reliability issues (cracked glass, screen reboots, poor paint quality, and the like). When asked for comment about the highest rated vehicle from owners no longer being recommended by Consumer Reports (whose surveys are of course totally dependent on user report), they had no comment. What more evidence do you need that people simply don't know what to make of Tesla? Except that they want to buy their cars, and will line up in the hundreds of thousands years in advance to get one.
So as long as Elon can avoid making any catastrophically bad decisions, Tesla is going to be the dominant player in EV technology for some time to come. And although many of his tweets are ill-advised his decisions about when to bring them the Model 3 to markets, his sense that the Model Y is an even bigger product, all look prescient.
And it's worth reminding all the doomsayers and gloomy financial experts that in relationship to disruptive technology, one or at most two players bolt out to a huge Head Start. It's only in mature industries that you see the lead shrinking and the pack reeling in the leaders. And given every bit of scientific evidence that climate change is accelerating at a pace not initially predicted, and that we are falling further and further behind, in terms of hitting targets to reduce its most punitive and even catastrophic effects, EV technology becoming a mature field can't happen soon enough. Tesla deserves enormous credit for proving first of all that an EV car can be a great car indeed even Best in Class, and for making EV technology sexy and desirable. It's unlikely we would readily transition to a more ecologically responsible technology if EV Vehicles were extremely unpleasant to drive, ugly and impractical. We can thank Tesla that they're not.
