They have some advantage in technology, but so far they are just ahead, but usually not by leaps and bounds. They have the most experience with the drive train,

They have some advantage in technology, but so far they are just ahead, but usually not by leaps and bounds. They have the most experience with the drive train, the battery and the self driving. However the real 'moat' they have, is producing EV profitably, as far as we know, the other auto makers, at least until this year, were never making money of EVs. At least Ford/GM will probably continue like that, the new Electic Mustang on paper competes with Tesla but uses a battery twice the size, meaning that it can not be very profitable, if at all. Tesla last Qt showed 25% margin on their cars. That is higher then most OEM get on their cars (usually its cheaper cars to be fair). Other OEM don't report the margins on their EVs, but most analysis shows that they make basically no money, and very often negative money. Tesla is pushing on batteries like crazy and trying to vertically integrated and innovate both on the chemistry and on the packaging. Most OEM buy battery cells from the same 3 companies, and that often leads to delays for all of them. LGChem in Czech Republic had shortages and that lead to like 5 different EV being produced in numbers far bellow announcement. With every car maker claiming to massively increase EV sales, those battery companies are standing to make huge money but they will capture much of the margin as well, because the battery is like 1/3 of the cost of the car. The next generation drive train Tesla has announced for their S, X, Cybertruck and Roadster will blow out of the water even what you can get from a 200k Porsche Tycan. Nobody else has announced anything like it. Breakdowns of Tesla shows that their cheaper drive trains are both lighter and cheaper to produce then the competition (see Sandy Monro). In terms of Self Driving, among OEM so far as I know they are the only ones that are building their own self driving computer. They costume design their own hardware solution including their own designing their own dedicated chip and software to run on those chips. Plus, their tight fleet integration of cars that already have the sensor suited necessary allows them to query the fleet and use driver to train the network. Also, these computers are pretty cheap and light to build compared to the hardware that is in a Waymo car. There are other things like software updates, business model innovation (no franchise dealership) that other car makers struggle with. The franchises is specially important because those dealers make their money on servicing, so they don't want to sell EVs. All in all its fair to say that they do have a lead on a number of fronts. The competition has been catching up slowly, but mostly because they stared from nothing basically.