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Originally Posted by Fuzz
That's an opinion that they screwed up, I laid out reasons why they may have been waiting for the right opportunity. What are the odds that every auto manufacturer on the planet got caught with their pants down? I'm not trying to be argumentative, it's just how I see it. We will just have to wait and see how it plays out.
It's not like Tesla is raking money in hand over fist, Elon acknowledged it is really really hard, and only recently have they had any profit at all. Why would someone like GM or Ford or VW dive into an unprofitable segment 5 years early, when they can wait for the right timing to do it?
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Again, profitability doesn't mean anything to Tesla when you can fund your expansion by issuing stock sales and completely avoiding the debt markets.
Traditional auto-makers can't do that, so trying to raise capital to fund $100B projects is not something their shareholders will agree with considering their margins have been flat for a while, and the capital will almost certainly come at a big cost.
That is why you can't just look at how profitable a company is and use it as a sticking point over whether or not they are ahead or behind someone else.
Tesla is also currently doing stuff, and developing tech that nobody else is currently doing. What they are doing is generating demand that they cannot meet. The way I see it, any auto-maker that wants to do the same thing will need be at least 5-10 years behind, which at this point is not something they will ever catch up too. The 5-10 years is the time that Tesla has spent getting to where they are now.
We are talking about economies of scale here, and not something as simple as build a factory, sell a car.
Most of the major auto-makers have also had some form of EV in their product lineup for quite a while and have never come close to generating the demand that Tesla has. So of course they will think that there is no point in spending billions more to compete with Tesla. But wait, they ARE actually spending billions already, and have nothing that comes even close.
So not sure why you think they haven't tried, and aren't failing miserably.
The biggest hurdle Tesla had was their manufacturing hell, and the inability to even remotely meet demand or growth. They have overcome this issue, and on top of that they are now building massive factories in 15 months to move even further head.
I honestly think most legacy car-makers are dead in the water. Tesla will be more valuable than Apple in 10 years.