It's great what tesla has done to push electric vehicles to the point of a status symbol, and prove their viability as an every day driving car. Tesla is a rem

It's great what tesla has done to push electric vehicles to the point of a status symbol, and prove their viability as an every day driving car. Tesla is a remarkable company, but they are terrible at building and delivering cars, which is very much the primary competence needed to succeed as a company that sells cars. Their production rates have dramatically trailed their promises, and while they are valued at around $160B, they are hoping to build about 500k cars this year. Volkswagon builds that many cars every 2 weeks or so, and actually makes a profit on each car, as does Toyota (10M cars each, per year, for VW and Toyota, 7M for GM and Hyundai, per year). Tesla is worth more than any two other car companies (other than Toyota) while producing around 5% as many cars as any one of them, if Tesla hits their goals. Success as as a car company is more about being able to produce cars that people want -- efficiently, than it is about designing cars that people want. Otherwise Lamborghini would be selling more cars than all the other car companies combined, if posters and dreams could somehow translate into units shipped without regard to price or ability to actually build cars in the necessary volume. The two huge success stories in cars are Ford, who invented the assembly line, and Toyota, who invented Kanban, both of which dramatically increased the quality while decreasing the labor input of manufacturing cars. Tesla, with all their claims of automation, produces cars using about 1/3 the automation of Toyota today (9 vs 24 cars for full-time employee per year) while using accounting tricks to claim large per car margins, while showing a large loss using standard accounting practices. I think if I had to make a guess, Tesla will be in the same chapter in the history of cars as DeLorian and Duesenberg.