What happens to Tesla market share if Tesla destroys all the competition and Rivian and Lucid don't turn into anything?
Governments can heavily stack the deck and produce desired outcomes.
Why doesn't Tesla have any significant market share in Japan? Despite making a better car than anything made in Japan? Tesla doesn't have significant market share in South Korea despite being there for years.
Why doesn't Tesla have significant premium auto market share in India,Brazil, and Indonesia? Because governments can effectively prevent their populations from buying Teslas.
One cannot argue with your second paragraph. Your fourth paragraph is absolutely wrong. India is anxious to move away from fossil fuels. Brazil has substantial BEV incentives through reductions in import duties and yearly auto license taxes in major States. Indonesia shares another trait with the other two.
All Tesla vehicles are too wide and long to be acceptable for the vast majority of sales in all the countries you list, with the least affected one being South Korea. Were Tesla to build narrower and shorter vehicles they would find receptive markets in most of these countries. For India and Indonesia, especially, purchase price would need to drop by >50 % from present levels.
it is very popular for US citizens to blame import restrictions for failure of US products that are: always too big (even toothpaste and soaps), usually too crude, and designed for oversized US tastes. Import restrictions are also important but those are not the base problem. US automakers have proven that for dozens of years. They have been successful when they have designed their products where they are used. Recent examples: Buick Envision, Ford Fiesta, Ford Transit ( multiple versions all sell well).
In my view Tesla understands this perfectly well. In both China and Germ any they have now or are building design centers that will certainly concentrate on more appropriate sizes. In the meantime...
No currently produced Tesla can park easily in any major Japanese city because none will fit in the car parking equipment, among other things. Anybody who has driven a Tesla in most European city centers knows just how cumbersome it is (FWIW I just drove a Model X for a couple of weeks around Northern Italy and elsewhere. Try parking in Lugano, Milan, or almost anywhere else!).
It is irritating to have people say repeatedly that import restrictions are the issue when the real problem is inappropriate design. Model 3 works well in more spacious EU areas and for use as taxi and such. Just imagine when the next, as yet undescribed, model arrives that us much smaller, especially narrower, than Model 3. It will help that the bees model will be cheap too. That one will dominate the ‘pocket rocket’ category from all corners on the world except the US of course. Even Canadian cities and Mexico like those. Margins will be great too.
FWIW, I have owned pocket rockets myself in five countries. As investors and Tesla vehicle fans, this category and the more mass lower spec versions will be the transformative ones. They also spawn, often on the same platforms, the minivans (cargo and passenger) that often outsell their sedan/hatch/suv variants.
All of those are produced in local factories worldwide, as they will be fir Tesla too.
Again, I don’t want to be rude, but import restrictions have little to do with the mass market, mostly because almost all large countries have enough scale to do local assembly/manufacturing locally anyway.