Once big auto moves to EVs, what will happen to Tesla? Will they have a significant foothold/advantage, or will their position erode? Will they get acquired or remain independent?
- Tesla's Model 3 interior is highly polarizing; you either love it or hate it. That will help carve out a niche even if all else is equal
- but most importantly, it's all about the batteries. Audi had to scale back e-tron production for 2019 due to battery supply issues; what's going to happen when the big carmakers need several orders of magnitude more batteries? Tesla has their own battery factory. OTOH, there are a LOT of chinese battery factories being built right now, we may see battery prices fall through the floor if they are overbuilding. Anybody who's watched the DRAM market over the past few decades knows what happens when you need really expensive factories to build a commodity...
1: https://electrek.co/2019/02/21/tesla-efficiency-range-test-a...
2: https://www.electrive.com/2019/04/23/audi-revises-production...
> As for Audi, I think that they are intentionally giving up their efficiency in order to protect the battery pack and get a higher charge rate.
Range is battery capacity divided by efficiency. You can give up range to protect the battery, by limiting the charging capacity or the discharge depth, but you cannot give up efficiency.
There are likely a multitude of factors from motors, to drivetrain, to drag, to gross weight which contribute to Audi’s lower efficiency e-Tron. They have a fairly large battery, although smaller capacity than Tesla’s largest, but only get ~200mi of range out of it. Their efficiency and range is lower than the 2012 Model S. This is one area where Tesla has an indisputable technical lead.
You could argue, for example, that Audi sacrifices efficiency to have lower interior noise levels, or that they had a body design with higher drag they weren’t willing to compromise. But drag and weight alone don’t fully account for the large efficiency difference.
I'm not convinced their superior efficiency is an unbridgeable moat either.
My biggest concern is their, and their CEOs approach to certain things, destroying goodwill to the point they cease being the tech darling. If you want to compete with BMW or Mercedes, you need the brand name and the engineering.
Tesla is at present way ahead of all the other auto companies here. That's because Musk realized a decade ago how important battery production is, and so Tesla and Panasonic built a battery factory that was about 10 times larger than any existing one. But who knows what the future will bring.
I hate the experience of buying a car. I hate going to a dealership. I hate haggling. I hate having to say no to every crap they want to sell me.
I think Tesla is a breath of fresh air in the car industry, and I think they're going to continue trying to do things differently than everyone else. We'll see how that spans out in the future, and if they're going to keep being able to fix these issues we've just come to accept with the traditional car industry.
I am very skeptical that this is ever going to happen, at least in any meaningful way. It's been pretty well established over the past couple of decades that corporations cannot steer away from their core profit centers, and thus far the auto manufacturers have done nothing to disprove this theory. So far, they have almost exclusively done nothing other than announcing future plans, but have not been able to pivot away from their core competencies.
There is a widespread belief that it is inevitable that Detroit, etc., will start producing EVs, and once they do so that Tesla will be crushed in very short order. I have seen no evidence to support this belief, despite Tesla having been in the market for over a decade.
Also governments at some point will start forcing their hand (and probably China will do that way before US given the current trend).
Tesla’s software, engine tech, and battery production would be a nice addition to Big Autos stack.
I’ve seen a few teams or line of businesses rally “Let’s get back our unique culture” after the merge. Not gonna happen if MegaCorp bought you. Everyone else already cashed out or left.
Not to mention that that sort of acquisition could be seen as "mission accomplished" given the right M&A voodoo or PR spin.
Tesla isn't immune to capitalism and is itself a product of it.
Also keep in mind if you look at the new electric vehicles, there isn't a one out today that beats the 2012 Model S in range (265 miles). Why is this? Because of the battery chemistry and drivetrain work that tesla has done which is leagues ahead of anyone. More vendors doing EVs might also make it cheaper to source some of the various components. I think more EVs is a net good for Tesla honestly as it pushes them more into the mainstream.
I doubt that. It's much more likely because something like the Leaf is nearly half the cost of a Tesla model S and are made at a profit. At one point Tesla had a big lead, but Nissan has been making hte Leaf for nearly a decade now. It's unlikely that any significant gap is there because of technology reasons.