It's not just the platform. Another hindrance is baseline expectations: if Tesla designs the exterior strictly form-follows-cda, it's the "Tesla style". If an I

It's not just the platform. Another hindrance is baseline expectations: if Tesla designs the exterior strictly form-follows-cda, it's the "Tesla style". If an ICE maker does the same they break brands identity. Same for interior minimalism. Same for configuration options. They are used to selling a product that is basically solved (consider how cheap you can get e.g. a Dacia) and filled whatever capacity in terms of mass, cost and complexity with extra bells and whistles. That their customers now expect, ICE or not. Or that they suspect their customers to still expect, that's perfectly sufficient to never dare going a bit leaner. But for a BEV the manufacturer mostly sells a battery (in terms of mass, in terms of cost, in terms of quality) and the entire rest needs to be lean. Lean in cost, lean in complexity, lean in physical characteristics like mass and cda like it wasn't really all that necessary with the ICE. A trivial example (in unnecessary complexity, physical properties not really involved): on the German website, when you pretend to be ordering an Audi A6 you get twelve different sets of wheels to choose from at five price points. And that's before you add winter wheels to the mix. And tire options, and different approaches to the pressure gauge problem and theft preventing bolts. The Tesla S offers a choice between baseline and expensive an optional winter wheel. Now this isn't an example that directly relates to range, but it's organisational cruft. They need to have boatloads of people employed only for solving various aspects of their solution to the made-up problem of not enough wheel choice (all the way from design to spare parts logistics..) and that robs focus. Those people might actually have better careers than their peers dealing with batteries and they do compete for intraorganizational attention. It's all rooted in customer expectations built over decades of inventing car problems to solve better than the competition, after the ICE was basically done. New, BEV-specific lines can help (apparently the e-tron gets by with only eight sets of wheels at two price points, yay!), but they are far from being as much of a fresh start as that blank slate as Tesla has been.