...in Silicon Valley. Tesla is far smaller than you think. The market and mind share outside of extremely wealthy sectors of the country is miniscule. Nobody where I live has even heard of them (unless, of course, you are a technically inclined forum reader).
HN seems to think Tesla has already won (even though they can't profitably produce a vehicle), and that everyone working for the auto majors are old, stodgy, and stupid. But I'm betting otherwise. I think they see that the writing is on the wall, and they're allowing Tesla to do much of the leg work.
On the other hand, here in the Northern Europe, people even outside of tech circles talk about Teslas and recognize them on the streets. But I very rarely hear people talking about other electric car models. I think Tesla has already tremendous global brand for such a young company.
Of course more people recognise the old guard, but that wasn't the point. The point is that Tesla already has a significant global mindshare in electric cars despite the fact that they have only sold less than 200K cars to date. I bet I'm not far off when claiming that almost everyone who is considering of buying a full electric car has heard about Tesla.
This has been debunked already. They can profitably produce cars but have chosen to double down on investment to grow and create new technologies. They are a hardware startup and can't scale "easily" like a tech startup could.
Have you ever looked at what all the auto majors spend on R&D? Do you you think that it's $0? Both GM and Ford spent $7 Billion on R&D last year. Tesla spent under $1BB. Yes, those old, stodgy, do-nothing companies outspent Tesla by a factor of 10-1 on R&D. This is a heavy R&D based industry.
...in Silicon Valley. Tesla is far smaller than you think. The market and mind share outside of extremely wealthy sectors of the country is miniscule. Nobody where I live has even heard of them (unless, of course, you are a technically inclined forum reader).
HN seems to think Tesla has already won (even though they can't profitably produce a vehicle), and that everyone working for the auto majors are old, stodgy, and stupid. But I'm betting otherwise. I think they see that the writing is on the wall, and they're allowing Tesla to do much of the leg work.