I have no doubt Tesla will ship the $30K car they said they'd ship. I think Elon Musk has proven his execution ability enough that it's not really in doubt.

The question is if Tesla's $30K EV is going to be better than Ford's $30K EV, or Nissan's $30 EV, or Toyota's $30K EV, etc etc.

We've seen Nissan make some very promising inroads into the EV market, and we know that all of the other major automakers are planning to enter it in a huge way. The question, again, is not whether or not Tesla is capable of shipping a $30K EV, it's whether or not they can beat everyone else at it.

We also know that the low and mid-end car market is much more economically driven than feature or style-driven. Tesla will be forced to compete on the economics of their vehicle way more than they've had to until now.

> "yet Tesla is leading the way - they will be the name everyone knows when it comes to electric"

I highly doubt this. Outside of tech and Valley circles most people don't know Tesla. Some have heard the name in passing, but most haven't. The recognizability of GM, Toyota, Ford, etc, is still several orders of magnitude beyond Tesla. I think it's unwise to look at the people directly around us (aka the tech elite) and extrapolate that to the mainstream.

As long as Ford, GM, et al move quickly into the EV market, they can out-brand Tesla.

> "and they will be far ahead of the game"

How so? They've mastered some things that won't really be applicable to the low end market. The big, gorgeous touchscreen UI? Almost certainly not making it into a middle-class vehicle. The supercharger stations? The economics of offering unlimited free energy for a car in that price range is sketchy at best.

So when it comes down to it it's all about the battery and the motors - and it doesn't appear that Tesla has any intrinsic advantage on that front over anyone else. They're not competing against incompetents, they're competing against companies whose bread and butter is motors - gasoline, electric, or otherwise. Tesla's technological lead is not so wide that a sufficiently organized, and sufficiently well-funded competitor can't catch up. And there are a lot of sufficiently organized, and sufficiently well-funded competitors very keen on toppling Tesla.

> "The profit on the Tesla is massive relative to current vehicle sales."

Well, yeah, they sell luxury vehicles at high margins. This is precisely my point - these margins are going to disappear as soon as Tesla enters the low end.

> "I'm pretty sure the cost of making a car these days $5,000 or less to produce a car"

I've worked in automotives. Excuse the slight rudeness, but you are insanely out to lunch. $5K to produce a car?! You realize this is the same bullshit we complain about constantly right? "Oh yeah, it'll just take you 5 minutes to write that code right?"

Manufacturing is expensive, it's time we put the bullshit "costs almost nothing anyways hurrrrr" myth to rest. Margins on cars are low, even in plants that do not use unionized labor (they do exist). The gap between union labor vs. not, especially when the car is being built in the West, is much, much smaller than you're imagining.

There is no way Tesla, or anyone else for that matter, is building a car for under $5K. Maybe if they got into the golf cart business.