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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

I would dispute that, in that big car companies have much deeper pockets, and thus have been readily spending on new tech, e.g. the big automaker acquisition of Cruise, Maven, Chariot. They seem more responsive to the changing nature of the industry.

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Acquisitions are all well and good, but unfortunately, when an asteroid hits you, all the umbrellas in the world won't help. Tesla has been attacking the hard problems (like battery cost) for close to a decade while most others kept busy making fun of them.

When you see Tesla causing drops to the tune of 15% or even 20% to the sales of premium ICE car brands, and who knows how much more it will be in the next quarters, a hit this big and this sudden can be quite destabilizing to a company with a highly optimized supply chain. Also, these companies haven't delivered something truly new in decades, and to do so now, under the gun, would require not a product revamp, but a culture revamp. Never heard one of those being pulled off.

Innovation is hard, let's ask for government assistance: https://www.reuters.com/article/autoshow-paris-electric-sque...

I don’t think the big automakers — especially the Americans and Japanese — can switch gears, as it were. The reasons for this are discussed elsewhere in this thread, but thus far the EV models produced by the legacy manufacturers have been underadvertised, token vehicles. They are not shifting resources away from their current exclusive focus on ICEs, and there is no sign they ever will. Sure, they’ll do a press release. Or something like the Bolt that is lived by owners but forgotten by GM itself, who happily continues on basically the same as yesterday. They can’t change.

Maybe VW. Maybe. But GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda... I don’t see it. Toyota is still trying to make hydrogen a thing, ferchrissake. Meanwhile Tesla is eating the luxury segment alive.

If — and it’s a big if — Tesla can achieve profitability with the Model 3 and get their crossover SUV into production, they’ll own the world.

> They seem more responsive to the changing nature of the industry.

Yet most of their responses so far are on paper - they will start producing electric cars, sometime in the future.

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