Key words are "at scale."
It's easy to be profitable at the high end, but that also comes with a negligible total addressable market. BMW and Mercedes still have all their R&D work ahead of them to advance their high-cost EV technology to catch up with Tesla.
BMW/Mercedes also didn't do the engineering legwork (like the other dinos), they just use a slightly different strategy to conceal the deficiency. They chose "make expensive and unpopular EVs" instead of "quietly lose money on EVs." Same shit different shovel!
At this point, I doubt they'll even try to catch up on technology. They'll retreat behind "we don't make cheap cars so why lift the cost curve with R&D," meaning they'll never contribute more than a rounding error in the EV transition.
It's doubling down on buggy-whips in 1905. It won't be pretty.