It's possible car companies have dropped the ball, but I don't think we can outright declare it yet. VW's timing, I think, has actually been excellent. The ID3

It's possible car companies have dropped the ball, but I don't think we can outright declare it yet. VW's timing, I think, has actually been excellent. The ID3 is a good car for a good price they can sell profitably. The program commenced in the fallout of dieselgate roughly around the same time as the Model 3. If they went all in just a few years earlier, it would have been on something like the E-Golf, not fit to be a mainstream car, and it would have ruined the company. Now, if they had the R&D strength of Tesla, the E-Golf could have been as good as the ID.3. But Tesla is unique. Car companies that achieve volume production over the next couple of years probably won't suffer terribly for the delay - but it will be less ideal than VW. Car companies that haven't ramped volume production by some cutoff (say 2025) will die without question. It's too late today to start that program, so the fate is already sealed for anyone without an iron in the fire. And it wouldn't have made sense for any company to try to compete with the Model S/X without amortizing the R&D over mainstream cars, similar to Intel's high margin Xeon chips which probably wouldn't exist in a vacuum. Tesla doesn't break out the finances enough to clearly tell, but they very likely lost money on the Model S/X program as a whole, although maybe they've turned it around in recent years. And that's with Tesla's unique R&D advantage which may have reduced costs by as much as an order of magnitude. Even if you build that car, you have to sell it to Tesla fans, at best splitting a small market, and at worse being ignored because of Tesla's impressive mindshare. (I'm not writing this as a direct argument to what you're saying, I think we probably broadly agree)