> existing middle management, customers, and supplier relationships

Not sure if dealerships falls into your list somehow, but I imagine they have to be one of the most challenging aspects of dealing with this distruption. You have hundreds/thousands of physical locations ready to distribute and sell your solution to this disruptive force, but with no incentive to do so.

In fact every incentive not to: reoccurring income through maintenance drops-off significantly, tougher crackdown on mark-ups, EV savvy customers expecting no-haggle/direct-to-consumer experiences, etc...

(I know Ford has really try to crack-down on these mark-ups, but dealers still manage to demand ridiculous prices for the Raptor, Bronco, Mustang and even the new Maverick)

> The real challenge is doing so sustainably, at scale. I’m particularly curious about their ability to source sufficient battery packs.

Same. I know there's all this talk about standing-up battery factories across the US, but they'll still be years behind China when they come online. Not to mention all these factories now have to be designed, financed and built in a time of some of the most significant inflation we've seen in generations. Not to mention the need for all the raw materials that the competition years ago secured for years to come.

Tesla's decision and timeline (2-3 new factories in the last ~2 years, pre-pandemic, pre-2022-inflation) to scale up manufacturing was impeccable. Their foresight and decisiveness to secure access to raw materials, tooling (Panasonic, Grohmann, Hibar, Idra) and financing (stock, cheap Chinese loans, etc) are some of the reasons why I doubt any of the incumbents will be able to compete for a long time.

And all of this is in the past or near to completion, while others are only now starting to do something about it after years of dismissing, ridiculing and underestimating the EV competition.

While the competition worries about catching up, Tesla seems to already be thinking of what comes next and doing something about now. In my opinion the two most important Tesla products are the factories and the Tesla robot.

It's encouraging to hear about incumbents like VW building up their own "giga-factories", but I feel like they've missed the point/opportunity when I hear about them building parts of the assembly line miles/countries away. I really like one of the principles of the giga-factory that is to measure the distance atoms have to travel from raw/semi-raw form to finished product, and minimize where possible. This is a core consideration when it comes to sustainability, scalability, dependability, stability, etc...

It's also been interesting to hear about how Tesla has been able to adapt their assembly-lines to deal with the chaos and uncertainty that exists in the supply-chains they still depend on.

In order to mitigate the existing and future labor shortages (or the price of providing individuals with a livable income, however you want to view it) companies mostly have two options: outsource and/or automate. When it comes to automation, I think Tesla is not only preparing themselves with a solution to reduce the repetitive, dangerous, undesirable parts of manual labor, but also a solution for their competition and the rest of us.

I guess a third is self-driving... but I think that's really just a manifestation of something larger and can probably be rolled in as part of the Tesla Robot development... AI/ML and Dojo. All of that computer vision, training, learning, modeling, etc... that goes into the development of self-driving is going pay-off in another ways for Tesla. It will be needed for humanoid robots as well as other robots that can be designed and built to work as part of the factory.

Do we expect the incumbents to put as much effort into developing their own robotics/AI solutions, or will they just end up leveraging other solutions and companies like Boston Dynamics, Grohmann (oh wait!), AWS, Nvidia, etc? Or perhaps they'll have no choice but to go to Tesla for robots or Dojo.

yeah, yeah, yeah, i know, i sound like a fanboi. I am.