New industry? What new industry? It's the automobile industry. No, sorry, the battery industry? Or did you mean the sheet metal fabrication industry? Or suspension fabrication industry? What new industry are you talking about?

Tesla has done a great job snowing everyone about creating a new industry when they've done nothing of the sort. Electric cars aren't new at all. As an example, go back to EV1.

People need to stop this delusion about electric cars somehow being special or difficult. They are EASY when compared to internal combustion cars. It's just an overgrown RC car, or electric forklift or golf cart. What, you think controlling hundreds of horsepower electronically is somehow special? Please, there have been electric machine, like backhoes, that are electrically powered for decades. How about massive electric cranes?

Electric motors and their control is well understood science. In fact one of the "bibles" on the subject, by Kenjo goes back decades. Not much changed. Same with switched reluctance drives, depending on how you look at it they go back anywhere from 30 to over 150 years.

Then there's the business of the supercharger network. The future of electric cars depends on universally available charging facilities, just like gas stations. A single vendor charging system isn't going to scale when you have ten, twenty or fifty million electric cars on the road. And Tesla isn't going to build that network.

Tesla only has some 90,000 cars out there and you can read reports of people having problems at supercharging stations. According to Tesla, they have over 500 supercharger stations. If we extrapolate from there, in order to support the over 250 million cars on the road in the US (if 100% of them were electric) you would need nearly 1,500,000 supercharger stations. That is so far beyond a single company it would be ridiculous to even begin to assume it would be a possibility.

So, BMW and others don't have a supercharger station problem at all. The 500 Tesla installations in place right now are a mere rounding error in the installed base required to support massive deployment of electric vehicles.

My guess is that charging will become far more distributed as technology advances. Once you have $30,000 cars that can go 600 miles on a full charge the game will change significantly. People will charge at home, work or while shopping.

You happen to be making my argument. The reason the large car makers haven't jumped in isn't because they can't make electric cars. They can make them just fine. They can run circles around Tesla. No, the reason is that the costs are too high for mass adoption and the infrastructure would cost even more. When the equation is at the correct balance point they'll jump right in, en masse. Tesla will either sink or swim, I don't know. A lot will depend on what they are standing on when that happens. But, it will happen.

Regarding Model 3. If Tesla can build it, so can everyone else. And they might be able to do it better and cheaper. There is no magic.

I don't hate Tesla. Not at all. I simply choose to do my best to be objective about the options in front of us today. In order for a Tesla to make sense financially you'd have to drive it about 100 miles per day and do so for business purposes in order to have tax advantages. Much below that and you can do far, far better with a good IC car from many brands. Once you get to the point where you only drive 20 to 40 miles per day there are a number of electrics with 20 to 80 mile range that make far more sense than a Tesla.

Now, if the purchase of a Tesla is about obtaining a badge indicating one is a member of a club and to simply feel good about the appearance of being environmentally responsible, hey, you know, maybe the $100K is worth it.

At one point my wife and I were seriously contemplating buying a Model S and a Model X (one each). That was until we did the numbers and it really started to not make very much sense. Then we sat in one and the interior was, well, it didn't compare well to our German-made cars at all. And then the Model X design started to be shown about and it was a total joke. It just stopped making sense. Sorry. That's my reality. Others might be perfectly happy. It isn't about money at all, they just don't make sense.