The more important component here is corporate culture; Tech and Talent are necessary but insufficient to capitalize on an opportunity... you also need vision.
Kodak invented digital image sensors in 1975 but they were never able to really capitalize due to the corporate paradigm surrounding film cameras... also their reluctance to cannibalize film sales.
The Legacy Automotive Manufacturing Enterprises (Lames) are mired in the same trap... they lack the vision that EVs are the future and don't want to cannibalize engine and transmission sales. They likely see it as more beneficial to keep fighting EVs than produce them.... I doubt they will offer an alternative without an intentional handicap (too expensive, too ugly or too little range) for several more years. The Lames are far more interested in prolonging the ICE-age than in producing appealing EVs... advantage Tesla :wink:
I pretty much agree.
I just finished listening to the audiobook version of the Elon Musk book by Ashlee Vance. It's a great insight into Elon's mind as well as his history.
He has an amazing ability to strip everything down to it's bare essentials, then rebuild the idea from the ground up. With both SpaceX and Tesla, he had planned to outsource a lot of the work, but when they started getting into things, they realized that not only did nobody have what his companies needed at a reasonable price, but in many cases nobody saw things anywhere close to how Elon saw it and the suppliers just couldn't get their mind around what his companies needed.
That's been one of the problems with schedules for both SpaceX and Tesla. Once they got into the project, they realized they needed to make what they needed from raw materials instead of being able to source things that are already there. The difference in cost between what SpaceX is able to do and what the aerospace industries everywhere else are doing is staggering.
The ICE companies have farmed out most of the manufacturing for cars these days and the only things they have kept in house are drive train development and final assembly. Everything else is made by third parties. They have a lot invested in their ICEs and they are reluctant to part with them. They are so locked in their paradigm they can't think of any other way of doing things.
Throughout his career Elon has run into people who fought him because they just could not see the world the way he sees it. He is very critical of the traditional auto business because he sees they are going about it in a very wasteful and backwards way. He is similarly critical of the aerospace industry because the technologies in use today by almost everyone are still stuck in a 1960s mindset. Nobody ever bothered to rethink rocketry in the last 50 years so they do it the way they have always done it with only a few evolutionary advances here and there instead of rebuilding things from the ground up.
In mindset Tesla is so far ahead of the traditional car companies, they have a huge learning curve to deal with. Some of the startups have gotten some of the Tesla lessons, but they don't have the talent to put together the manufacturing system Tesla has built. Nor the rest of the infrastructure Tesla has. Tesla thought out everything needed to build cars, sell them, and support them from scratch. It's their killer advantage over all other startups.
Google and Apple have the money to make a lot of mistakes along the road to doing their own startups in the auto business. And they have the money to establish the infrastructure needed. While they might produce some new automotive technologies that will eventually go into cars, I'm not sure they are ever going to produce their own cars. I might be wrong about that though.
In the book Musk points out that if other car makers want to mass produce EVs, they need to build their own Gigafactories. And nobody is doing it right now. He pointed out the Gigiafactory has to be done at least a year before the Model 3 goes into mass production and it takes a few years to get that built and operating.
After listening to the book, I'm more convinced than ever that Tesla and SpaceX are here to stay and both are just the first shots in a revolution in both space and cars. Right now Tesla has at least a 5 year head start over any plausible competition, probably more lead than that.
The demand for Teslas is very strong. The only thing holding back a large segment of the population is the current price. I keep running into people who's dream car is a Tesla. Once the Model 3 comes out, I don't think they will be able to keep up with demand.
