Also check this analysis of the same report by German Handelsblatt (in English): https://global.handelsblatt.com/companies/german-fears-cover...

For reference, that's a quality German news publication making the point that German car manufacturers are getting worried, which is probably an understatement.

Basically last year, Tesla outsold the German manufacturers in their home market for electrical vehicles. This year is not looking much better. The total amount sold in Germany per month last year was about half what tesla is claiming to do per week last recently. Meanwhile the model S is outselling essentially all similarly priced traditional cars in Europe as well.

Unsurprisingly, VW, Audi, Mercedes, etc. have all announced electric vehicles starting to ship "from next year" (numbers unknown, presumably nowhere near 5k a week any time soon). Most manufacturers are being hand wavy about early 2020s type time frames for volume production. If they do have cost issues like this analysis suggests, they'll be struggling to compete on price and volume for quite some time.

So, Tesla undercutting them on price and volume is a big deal. Tesla doing battery production and other components in house is a big deal as well. Tesla opening up more giga factories in places with cheaper labor (e.g. China) or in Europe (Germany is being rumored) is a big deal as well.

I've been reading all these comments about the imminent implosion of Tesla here on hacker news and I just don't see it. Basically people pulling numbers out of their ass and predicting they won't even last until end of the year. Last time I read comments like this about a company was when I was reading internal comments on the iphone launch while working at Nokia. Needless to say, Apple did rather well regardless of those comments. Basically high placed Nokia seniors were arguing passionately the iphone was shit, the cost was way to high, and no way Apple could match their logistics, and btw. the latest Nokia phones had feature X, Y, and Z so obviously Apple was fucked. Spectacularly wrong on all fronts and Nokia was history five years later because it never managed to recover from being so spectacularly wrong in time to come up with decent, competitive products.

I learned a lot about seemingly smart people being completely wrong and suffering from confirmation bias in that phase of my career. I'm seeing exactly the same patterns in the car industry today.

I'm seeing a company doing more or less what Apple did to traditional phone manufacturers about a decade ago doing more or less the same for cars. The same kind of arguments and the same disbelief as Tesla ticks off milestone after milestone. Also the same kind of excited user base. Teslas are selling in a way that is very similar to how the iphone market has been rock solid for a decade now. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most Tesla owners were also early iphone adopters. Sure Tesla is behind schedule. But what schedule is that other than their own ambition? What clock is ticking exactly? What other manufacturer is shipping 5K electric vehicles per week; or even planning to, or realistically close to our producing and undercutting Tesla on price and quality?