Automakers are still at the bury-your-heads-in-the-sand-and-hope-the-nasty-people-go-away phase of competition. They'll wake up eventually, probably about the time Model E is cannibalizing their sales....
Most of them really are, except I'd describe it differently: the institutional culture of most of the automakers is "We build gasoline engines!" Just like oil companies cannot diversify because they think of themselves as oil companies, automakers cannot diversify because they think of themselves as *engine* makers.
Nissan is the exception and appears to be quite serious about electric cars. Nissan, however, has targeted the low end of the market (so it's not competing directly with Tesla) and is several steps behind Tesla: for example, adding thermal battery management this year (five years behind Tesla).
It is likely that some of the automakers will *never* manage to change their institutional culture and will disappear the way the steam car manufacturers did.
It is likely that some other automakers will wake up to the electric-car future. But it seems that even when they do so, the power of the "not invented here" mentality will cause them to reinvent things which Tesla was doing right with the Roadster (as Nissan did), which will leave them far behind...
As for "meticulous plannning".... I'm the sort of person who worries about every possible problem in advance (so as to prevent it), so I have range anxiety. But even with the substandard charging infrastructure currently in place, with a little help from my friends I worked out not one, not two, but many routes from upstate NY to west Michigan, all of which will take about as much time as they would with a gasoline car. I can pick my route on the spur of the moment. I think in a couple of years as charging gets built out (Sun Country Highway is expanding very, very fast), charging is not going to be much of an issue unless you're out in the Northwest Territories or something.
