Which is what’s burning down right now. The labor relations, the threats to outsource, Musk’s reputation. Along with much more present things like the terrible build quality and looming crisis over “self driving”. How much cache will Tesla have at that point? It’s going to end up like MG, which is a badge placed on some budget Chinese market cars.
It just seems like the big things here are mainly infrastructural. the Big automakers have tech in spades, like I said almost everything Tesla does on the EV front originates in other automakers. Those companies didn’t stop working on this, they just didn’t prioritize it to the same extent (and Tesla spent a lot of time prioritizing it before it was practical).
All of these companies have at least multiple generations of fully developed and tested concepts and prototypes. Chevy and Nissan both have multiple generations of shipped production EVs, as do others. Volvo spun off their entire performance division as a separate EV specialized subsidiary. Practically everyone else has at least a base line in hybrids, if not plug in hybrids.
What’s lacking is infrastructure to ship it at scale. Factories and tooling. Battery supply. Repair systems.
Tesla is basically made of that stuff. Cause it’s the only thing they do.
They produced a second generation until 2003, so they kept it around for 13 years. And they were one of the first major automakers to launch a more modern plug in hybrid and EV in the 10s. So I doubt they dumped most of the tech behind it.
Interestingly GM execs have said if they’d launched the plug in hybrid version of the EV1 one they’d developed we’d have had electric cars 10 years earlier
Ford had an all electric version of the Ranger at the time. For the same reasons. Those were also lease only, but only offered to fleet customers. Apparently both companies went that route because of the crap battery tech available at the time.
And they killed the product the same time GM did, apparently for the same reasons. Lack of interest meant it didn’t make up enough of the cars they were putting out to keep up with the California rules it was created for. They likewise started launching more modern EVs around a decade later.
