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You are comparing market cap to auto makers that all have a pretty bleak future - unless it's one of those with strong presence in the EV space. Remember that

You are comparing market cap to auto makers that all have a pretty bleak future - unless it's one of those with strong presence in the EV space. Remember that no new ICE cars will be allowed to be sold within the European Union starting 2035.

Amezarak 4y ago
Is there some reason to believe auto makers will be totally unable to shift to EV? Particularly when most of them already have EVs? I also checked the stats, and it doesn't seem like the market cap of other auto makers have dropped because of Tesla. They're all over the map but generally trending positive, going back 12 years, which as far back as this site lets me go. I agree they aren't selling a lot of EVs...but I also think a lot of that is just that EV demand is just not that high outside of certain bubbles, and certainly not at the current price point. Teslas, even Model 3s, are priced as luxury cars (I can't afford one myself), and have cachet among a certain set. Most EVs are worse off, in that they don't have the Tesla glamour. But there's no reason I can imagine that situation is permanent. When/if demand changes due to regulation or economics or evolving tech, it's going to be a very different environment. This is particularly true as batteries become commodities. I don't want to handwave away the engineering, but electric motors are not revolutionary technology. Even if we assume Tesla comes out on top, it seems crazy to believe Tesla is going to come out on top so hard that it sells 95% of all new vehicles globally. NB: I think the auto industry future is very bleak for other reasons: we could make a great, reliable electric vehicle, but instead we're packing them full of shoddy electronics and software that will have unpredictable and difficult-to-troubleshoot failure modes (as is already the trend in ICE cars, where electronics are a bigger and bigger problem.) They will end up having to be serviced by manufacturers only and we'll probably all be cursed with subscription plans. Life will me much harder for those less well off.
- hansfilipelo 4y ago
  Is there some reason to believe auto makers will be totally unable to shift to EV? Well no, but so far every legacy carmaker switching to EVs has seen a lot of issues in scaling up their production capacity. I myself thought that VW would destroy Tesla in this regard, but they havn't. Note that I'm not saying that Teslas evaluation isn't too high in its current state - what I'm saying is that it's not _unreasonable_ that it is a lot higher than any legacy carmaker. And higher than a few of them together isn't unreasonable either since they make 5x the amount of EVs as Hyundai and VW makes together. This is while scaling production at a faster pace than those two as well - so the gap is widening rather than the other way around.

Amezarak 4y ago

Is there some reason to believe auto makers will be totally unable to shift to EV? Particularly when most of them already have EVs? I also checked the stats, and it doesn't seem like the market cap of other auto makers have dropped because of Tesla. They're all over the map but generally trending positive, going back 12 years, which as far back as this site lets me go. I agree they aren't selling a lot of EVs...but I also think a lot of that is just that EV demand is just not that high outside of certain bubbles, and certainly not at the current price point. Teslas, even Model 3s, are priced as luxury cars (I can't afford one myself), and have cachet among a certain set. Most EVs are worse off, in that they don't have the Tesla glamour. But there's no reason I can imagine that situation is permanent. When/if demand changes due to regulation or economics or evolving tech, it's going to be a very different environment. This is particularly true as batteries become commodities. I don't want to handwave away the engineering, but electric motors are not revolutionary technology. Even if we assume Tesla comes out on top, it seems crazy to believe Tesla is going to come out on top so hard that it sells 95% of all new vehicles globally. NB: I think the auto industry future is very bleak for other reasons: we could make a great, reliable electric vehicle, but instead we're packing them full of shoddy electronics and software that will have unpredictable and difficult-to-troubleshoot failure modes (as is already the trend in ICE cars, where electronics are a bigger and bigger problem.) They will end up having to be serviced by manufacturers only and we'll probably all be cursed with subscription plans. Life will me much harder for those less well off.

hansfilipelo 4y ago
Is there some reason to believe auto makers will be totally unable to shift to EV? Well no, but so far every legacy carmaker switching to EVs has seen a lot of issues in scaling up their production capacity. I myself thought that VW would destroy Tesla in this regard, but they havn't. Note that I'm not saying that Teslas evaluation isn't too high in its current state - what I'm saying is that it's not _unreasonable_ that it is a lot higher than any legacy carmaker. And higher than a few of them together isn't unreasonable either since they make 5x the amount of EVs as Hyundai and VW makes together. This is while scaling production at a faster pace than those two as well - so the gap is widening rather than the other way around.