I believe OP was referring to how current gen smartphones were at least a few years “behind” (in terms of underlying tech and software) when the iPhone first came out, leaving the rest of the industry to play a catch-up game.
The only thing that holds Tesla down is whether they can scale production fast enough not to let others in. Forget about finance by now. They are not going bankrupt.
Production cycles in cars are at least 3 years. So the traditional manufacturers that more or all have announced they will market a competitive EV in 2019-2020, will get a second try in 2022-2023. I talk about their second try because it's unlikely that they will produce truly competitive EVs next year in their first try. Range and price are the main factors, and the range they talk about is generally 350-450 km, so a bit less than the Model 3 currently being produced, which have a range of 510 km. Tesla has historically upgraded their models with better batteries so it's a good bet that in 1-2 years Model 3 will have even better range. And the ones that they talk about now that have a range comparable to Model 3 are generally priced more like Model S or Y, so for a much smaller market.
In other words, I expect the old car manufacturers to market truly compatible EVs in 3-4-5 years. If Tesla can double it's production of Model 3 and other medium or low priced cars every year Tesla can produce
10k weekly mid 2019
20k weekly mid 2020
40k weekly mid 2021
80k weekly mid 2022
Needless to say that if that were to happen, and they produce 4 million EVs yearly in 4 years, it would be very hard for most of the others to get any footing in the market.
Maybe Tesla could achieve that by simply copying the existing production lines at the current Giga Factory or somewhere else in the world. We think that they would have to build huge factories which in itself takes time, and that they would have to innovate and automate much more than now but maybe part of the production could be achieved by adding more tents and hiring more people. Do we know?