This is total conjecture, of course, so take it for what it is.

I need to go back a ways on this one. I have been flying model aircraft for decades.

If you go back far enough it was impossible to even consider flying an electric powered airplane because alkaline batteries simply didn't have the energy density.

Sometime later came NiCd batteries and they eventually hit that sweet spot where you could stick a few of them in a plane, put a motor in the nose and fly for a few minutes. I had gliders with 27 NiCd cell packs what weighed in at somewhere around six or eight pounds all by themselves.

A few years went by (6 to 10, don't remember) and LiPo batteries surfaced. Now I could actually fly jets. And the glider with the super heavy 27 cell NiCd pack got a very light and small six cell LiPo pack, a far more efficient brushless motor and performance was out of this world.

Today electric powered model aircraft are probably the majority of the product sold and they include high powered helicopters and even the "impossible" quadcopters.

These transitions were mainly the result of energy storage technology, nothing else mattered until you could carry enough energy at a favorable weight ratio and in a favorable volume.

The companies that brought us these transitions, very much in the spirit of "The Innovator's Dilemma" [1], were not the same companies that provided the older energy storage technologies.

This is where I come full circle to Tesla and the Gigafactory.

Tesla has done a great job with this and it has positioned itself to benefit from scale in manufacturing battery packs with the existing best-in-class energy storage technology. They will, in this regard, do well.

Yet, this will become a significant liability if and when the next step change in energy storage technology comes about. Scale has it's benefits, but it can also kill you.

Again, this is conjecture. Imagine a day within the next 3 to 5 years when someone demonstrates a technology with three times the capacity, in half the volume, with half the weight and none of the longevity problems. We recently saw just such an announcement, although it seems the technology suffers from a power-to-weight issue at the moment.

Imagine someone else finally develops a supercapacitor system that makes current Lithium-based cells look as bad as they made NiCd cells look years ago.

Whoever does that will trigger the inflection point and a massive migration away from internal combustion engines to electric powerplants. Just like it did with model airplanes.

In the model airplane world, the pioneers of electric flight were absolutely skewered by the established (and some new) players in model airplane manufacturing. Most people today don't even know the names of the pioneers.

Tesla could suffer this fate. The Gigafactory could actually become a huge liability. Imagine having such an operation at a time when nobody has any interest in the technology you can produce.

I truly believe other manufacturers are waiting in the wings for this inflection point while they experiment and get ready. I have a gut feeling we are not too far from that moment in time when a significant enough technology shift occurs to make electric transportation viable for the masses.