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Originally Posted by opendoor
Teslas have their issues, but the company can actually build enough to meet the demand and do it profitably. Not a single legacy car company has shown an ability to do either of those things, and it's not going to get easier. And Tesla has enough profit margin that they can cut prices a fair bit still if they want to undercut their non-Chinese competition. One of the benefits of being a newer company run by a union buster.
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From what I've seen the biggest losers are going to be ICE manufacturers in Japan, US, and Europe who cannot transition properly.
Toyota has famously tried to sit on the fence regarding EVs and have fumbled many times. Honda is not developing their own EV drivetrains and is going to rely on GM. BMW/Mercedes are deeply entrenched in ICE engineering and there are many signs they are dinosaurs in adapting.
China is the biggest threat to all these automakers as they have a huge domestic market to build and test out technologies (and massive, unified government support) and then they can sell to the rest of the world if approvals and protectionist tariffs don't kill them somehow. I would love to have a Chinese EV choice here in Canada (Norway has some).
For Tesla, I think their competitive advantage (aside from the stock market hype) and how the Model Y is the best selling vehicle in the world right now is that they are trying to focus on those cost cutting manufacturing steps to further increase their margins and allow for price reductions when the real competition does show up.
They are anti-union and actively trying to automate their manufacturing into simple steps like the gigapress which stamps the whole car in one piece rather than having humans or robots assemble and weld parts together.