The metaphor would be that no combination of people will ever be able to compete with Toyota, Honda etc... and if they tried would be acquired or beaten to death by Honda because they are leveraging their massive scale.
So while Tesla has definitely driven innovation here, there are still MAJOR hurdles to them being globally competitive.
Further it took Billions and someone like Elon Musk to be able to get even this far, so in that context if even Musk and tons of government dollars can't get there then it's safe to say nobody can.