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Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

They wouldn't have to sell "only EVs". They could have continued selling EVs while selling their soon to be vintage cars.

All three companies have several brands (VW has Porsche, Audi, Skoda etc.) and each of their brands have several models. They are also produced in several factories in different countries.

4-5-6 years ago, when Tesla demonstrated to the world that an EV can have longish range and look attractive, the traditional car companies could have allocated resources and production lines to develop and produce competitive EVs. They would have been in a much better place to compete than tiny Tesla 5 years ago. But now, they are late in the game.

It's more a symptom of failed management than some function of a business law.

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Tesla has a somewhat of a competitive advantage here not related to timing. Structurally EVs are giant battery packs with attractive packaging, therefore the biggest cost component is the battery pack itself. If you can commit to bulk orders (like Tesla did with Panasonic), you can get the price of the battery pack down.

Everybody else pays the market price, which explains either vehicles at higher cost (BMW i8) than Tesla or vehicles with severely reduced range (VW eGolf).

The i8 only has a small battery. It has a high price because it's a luxurious high-performance car.

My tesla 85D has better performance in every way. More horsepower, faster 0-60, more space etc. Etc.

Hidden in your argument there is an even bigger one: traditional car manufacturers have outsourced almost everything to their high level suppliers except for the engines. When they switch to EV they give up on the only part where they have a considerable depth of added value. They could become their own cell manufacturers (and in fact almost all of them have tried, before learning that batteries are too much of a commodity for them to be competitive on the small scale of early EV introduction), but there is zero knowledge transfer opportunity from ICE to battery.

It's not difficult for them to build EV. But it is nearly impossible for them to do so earning money, when they are essentially repackaging third party batteries into shells consisting of all the other stuff they are buying from their existing suppliers.

I think you are overlooking the fact that very few people buy cars for the engine technology.

They buy on design, price, prestige, history and possibly other 'soft' aspects.

But if scale is key to winning here, can anybody compete with china - for mass market vehicles ?

We're already starting to see BYD aiming to have 34GWH battery manufacturing capacity in 2020, same as Tesla.

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