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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

In really don't like framing this as winning or losing. Tesla has already won - they've successfully entered the market, they have customers and are making money (plenty of revenue at least, I don't know about profit)

I want electric cars to win. That doesn't happen if Tesla is the only company making them.

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More importantly, multiple entrants into the electric vehicle market will drive development in new directions.

If it were only Tesla doing anything of note - with all the best will in the world - the evolution of products would ultimately stagnate as they refined their own particular flavour of electric vehicle.

A monopoly held by a young, interesting company is still a monopoly.

Indeed. I'm happy to see Tesla succeeding, because I love their moxie and feel like the Big 3 have had a forcible perspective shift coming for a long while now, but I have no interest in buying one of Tesla's cars. The powertrain is great but I hate the cockpit and the "phone home" stuff. I am looking forward to future competition which moves into the market Tesla is prying open and offers a car which I might be happy to drive.

I think they won in the sense that they forced the industry to move towards EVs. The Porsche Mission E just got the green light and I believe Mercedes announced they were releasing 4 new fully electric models in the coming years. I expect more auto makers to do the same now that the Model 3 is going into production, piling up preorders and threatening sales of ICE cars in the 30-40k price range.

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