When a legacy manufacturer or EV startup adds to the EV supply, it takes from ICE vehicle market share, not Tesla market share. So any new EV is an ICE killer, not a Tesla killer. The majority of people buying EVs from legacy brands are doing so because they are fans of those brands; they weren't going to be buying a Tesla anyway. And even those who considered Tesla and chose another brand do not result in a lost sale to Tesla since someone else will buy that unit. Demand exceeds supply.
Another faux pas the article makes is assuming that the number of models has any meaningful relationship to the number of units delivered to customers. Tesla continues to dominate the world EV market with just four models: a mid-size sedan, a CUV, a full-size sedan, and a mid-size SUV. It doesn't matter if you have 11, 14, or 30 models in the pipeline if you simply cannot manufacture as many units because of battery constraints or whatever excuse applies at the moment.
It's also bizarre to see Tesla's very high R&D capital efficiency as a liability:
> Tesla, by contrast, has spent less in total vehicle R&D since 2008 than Toyota and Mercedes-Benz each spent in 2020 alone.
Toyota has essentially nothing of note in the BEV space to show for their big R&D expenditures in 2020, aside from the underwhelming BZ4X.
The article claims traditional OEMs are poised to out-produce Tesla with no explanation of how they expect to achieve Tesla's current production rate, let alone Tesla's future production rate with two big factories spinning up in Austin and Berlin.
Don't get me wrong. I really like the looks of several EVs from the likes of Polestar and Nio. But it's clickbait to call these "Tesla killers."
Just be honest: they are ICE killers.