Tesla’s battery day affirms Wright’s Law and spells trouble for the competition

This means the competition will have to stomach a loss per electric car sale until they catch up to Tesla’s price advantage or not be cost competitive. According to the author Tesla was 3-4 years ahead, with a growing gap given the battery day announcement (5+ years?).<p>This can already be seen when looking at existing competition. VW’s ID4 compact SUV will cost $40k pre-subsidy when introduced next year, vs Tesla’s model Y at the same price.<p>VW itself isn’t a luxury brand, unlike Tesla, and wouldn’t normally be compared. The audis, BMWs etc would likely produce a more expensive car. The most comparable luxury brand cars are Porsche’s taycan which starts at $100k vs Tesla’s model S at ~$75k, polestar (Volvos electric brand), Jaguar I-pace, Audi etron etc which are all substantially more expensive while typically delivering less range and a worse software experience (which i’d say is the new panel gap).<p>All in all this looks to me very much like the smart phone transition when apple and Samsung&#x2F;google took over the market. Maybe 1-2 of the old guard will survive, with everyone else ending in the slaughterhouse.

&gt; Tesla&#x27;s speed of iteration and degree of verticalization make leaks and learnings harder to apply to other companies.<p>This is a point that has more value than IP itself.<p>Being ahead allows you to protect your research about some new tech that no one is looking at, ok.<p>But just having to figure details in a factory is the real thing, it&#x27;s what makes difference. Quality is a product of repetition with near perfection. Figuring it out is time consuming, see Intel x TMSC.

The twitter poster is delusional. There is no such tech gap, in fact, building electric vehicles is much easier than ICE vehicles, the only reason the traditional car makers are not heavily invested in EVs is because there is not much profit in this segment at this time.

Battery prices are falling around 15-20% every couple of years for everyone not just Tesla. Tesla 3 year target is not much different from over all price declines <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;883118&#x2F;global-lithium-ion-battery-pack-costs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;883118&#x2F;global-lithium-io...</a>

I thought the really interesting part was the vertical integration from “ore “ through production to recycle plus the manufacturing streamlining &#x2F; integration of the cells. If they pull this off and eliminate all the margins otherwise involved they will put themselves at a $&#x2F;kWh point that only those with very deep pockets will have a chance of matching. So a lot of consolidation to come and remaining others going niche &#x2F; upmarket.

Model 3 was supposed to be the 25k car, 3 years ago according to Tesla

What is the nature of Tesla&#x27;s relationship with Panasonic the days? To what extent is this Tesla&#x27;s battery technology, and to what extent is it Panasonic&#x27;s?

Given that Tesla&#x27;s battery capacity is a small fraction of that already purchased by legacy OEMs, any pricing advantage will accrue to these larger OEMs.

If you follow that guy&#x27;s logic, then BYD would&#x27;ve been steamrolling every competition left, and right, Musk included, but it doesn&#x27;t happen.<p>There are quite a number of laggards in the market making decent money, and some probably have better margins than the competitors at the bleeding edge.

This is fascinating.<p>Tesla needs as much driving data as possible.<p>Every of order of magnitude makes it that much harder for competitors to reach.<p>Once they get a critical amount, the AI of driverless will fall into place.<p>They will be subsidizing low cost vehicles just to get the driver data.

I don&#x27;t see why this is a bad outcome for consumers.<p>I don&#x27;t care that other car companies cannot compete. There will be car companies that can, eventually. There may even be new car companies that doesn&#x27;t exist yet competing!

Why are they focused on improvements in margins that are this small now? At autonomy investor day last year they promised a Robotaxi network this year that would give around a $150,000 margin on each car. They would quit selling the cars at current prices at that time, so they said customers better buy FSD early to get in on the action. Your car would generated you around $30,000 per year in profit according to the event.<p>These plans eventually lead to the stock price shooting up ten-fold in anticipation.<p>They could get battery cost down to zero and it wouldn&#x27;t be as profitable as what they were talking about just last year.<p>The announcement at this new event of a $25,000 car available for sale to consumers because people don&#x27;t all have enough for the model 3 doesn&#x27;t make any sense given what was promised last year. It could add to the Robotaxi fleet, but would make no sense to sell to consumers without enough money when it could be operating as an automated taxi driver earning Tesla money instead.<p>One thing Musk says in this new presentation is that all manufacturers will eventually have autonomy, so this battery stuff is what really makes Tesla a valuable company. But the timeframe doesn&#x27;t make sense. Either Tesla has some decent exclusivity period on autonomy, or autonomy isn&#x27;t worth much to people buying FSD now, because there will be lots of Robotaxi competition. And in the case of a decent exclusivity period on autonomy, none of these margin improvements matter and the near term release of a $25,000 car to consumers is a huge mistake.<p>Go back and watch autonomy investor day and see if any of it holds up to scrutiny.