Their distribution, dealer network, marketing, etc. is in place world-wide and very well established.
But I maintain that the primary focus of an automotive manufacturer is their powertrain. This is evidenced by the outsourcing of many of those other components, and by the relative budgets given to those different R&D departments. Furthermore, the other departments have become tightly coupled to the powertrain: The chassis is largely designed around the engine bay, not a large battery and electric motor. Engine braking is barely an afterthought in the design of the brakes, and regenerative braking changes a lot of that design. Auxiliary systems like entertainment, power steering, air conditioning, etc. have the existence of an alternator and serpentine belt as a fundamental principle.
Whether it's 180 or 90 degrees, it's still a difficult change for a big company.
The VW Group re-uses the same engines across lots of its different brands - for a high-performance or electric car then of course the powertrain is important. For everything else its just one component and as long as it is good enough I suspect people aren't really that interested.
Edit: Other manufacturers may do this, I'm just more familiar with VW Group cars.
They all reuse components and designs as much as possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_platform
I think the grand-parent comment is vastly overestimating how much of the car business these days is based on tuning the internal combustion engine, which for the most part has seen about all of the advances it is going to see. The rock stars of the car world are now the process and manufacturing guys (and possibly the software guys, though not as much as you'd hope or expect), who still have the power to squeeze the margins tighter than any other engineering division does, and provide more competitive advantage than any other engineering division does.
rant Electric motors are commodity items that can easily be thrown onto most chassis. Why does Elon Musk always make such a big deal about not having patents? Mostly because he doesn't have any sexy patents to trot out anyways so its good PR fluff. end rant
I think Tesla can survive and thrive, and break the 100 year drought in new car companies, but I think it's a mistake to think that's because they are going to out maneuver car companies at the car game, it's because they are becoming battery experts that they'll win. Tesla is a battery company with a car division.
Yes, but it is all built around selling the ICE as the ultimate driving machine. To compete with Tesla, the entire marketing machine will have to be reworked in such a way as to imply that their previous flagships are now legacy.
That is a bitter pill and will face much internal political resistance, regardless of the technical issues involved.
>> Yes, but it is all built around selling the ICE as the ultimate driving machine.
That... doesn't really make any sense. A Tesla and a Mercedes are literally indistiguishable from each other on the basis of their powertrain. They both look the same and have the same function and work the same.
If I modified a Tesla to ICE and it was your next Uber ride you would not really be able to tell the difference unless you were closely paying attention, and vice versa. Yes there are some performance differences and sound differences, sort of, but from a functional perspective they're both just luxury cars, outside of refueling the user experience is exactly the same.
Sure, it's an engineering challenge, but the idea that the dealer network and marketing don't apply equally well to electric cars is totally unsupported. In fact, the luxury car marketing experience is so similar across the board that you just used the BMW slogan to describe Mercedes Benz.
If you modified a P100D to use a Mercedes drivetrain, the car would feel slower and would launch like an ICE car. The feeling of initial acceleration in an all-electric performance car like the P100D is vastly different. Maybe you wouldn't notice from the backseat of a taxi, but that isn't really the point in selling a performance car. :)
But even that doesn't really matter as much as you might think. I think the fundamental issue is that you appear to be using engineer thinking and are thinking about the situation from a purely logical framework. Buyers in the real world don't behave that way and the romance copy and image that a company sells really does matter in the marketplace.