You guys are hilarious. Do you really think that Tesla doesn't have development teams? That they aren't innovating? I'm not a Tesla apologigst. I don't own one and if I had wanted to I would have bought one. At some point I might buy an EV but then again at some point I think all of us will be FORCED to buy an EV.
I'll throw out a couple of points though.
Tesla has a few thousand engineers and over $3B in cash. I think that's more than enough to compete with any of the larger car manufacturers. Especially as they are myopic around EV engineering.
The gigafactory, which is under construction, will be the largest battery manufacturer in the world. Lithium production and especially sales is increadibly opaque. Like really really opaque. There is no spot price for instance. My firm has a rare earths/metals banking and research team and we know that Tesla has off-take agreements that make it one of the largest lithium buyers/controllers in the world. You either get lithium through brines or hard rock. One you have to wait years for the sun to do its job, you can't just go get more. The other you have to create a mine and anyone that knows about mining knows that isn't a 2 year operation let alone a two month one. Having the largest battery factory in the world and being one of the largest controllers of lithium in the world for the forseeable future will ensure that Tesla will be a factor in any EV market for at least the medium term (you can talk about graphene etc all you want, it's decades away from commercial applications). Also the 21-70 battery they will be building there is a technically better battery than the panasonic 18650 which EVERY EV in the world uses in its batteries.
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Past-President, Porsche Club of America - Upper Canada Region