The electric car industry hasn't remotely boomed. Electric cars are still deeply strangled by two key factors: industry inertia and the cost/supply of lithium batteries. Once those two factors are solved (and a build-up of lithium mines is key to that) electric cars will go from being a niche within a niche to utterly dominating the market very, very quickly. Within the next decade we might see companies like Hyundai…
> In my opinion Tesla needs to prepare to be in the budget space. They need to partner with an external manufacturer to sell a product with normal door handles that competes with Hyundai and Toyota. Because once the cost of batteries falls, I predict a substantial slice of their market will simply disappear to the economy manufacturers. I suspect that many people who love Telsa really just love the idea of electric v…
1. Smartphones provided a new type of utility and a very significant leap of value to the user (I bet most people do other stuff than calling for the vast majority of time spent with their phones, which was not the case with feature phones or generally before the iPhone). Electric cars provide a minor difference in new utility and probably also value. It's more a difference in the means rather than a difference of the end result.
2. Phones are significantly cheaper than cars. Thus, there's a much larger market unit wise than cars (there are probably a similar number of units in use at any point in time, but cars don't get thrown away after 2 years...)
Apple did something similar which is pretty well known in disruption theory. They moved up the market and became a truly premium phone company. That's also why they have a quite small portion of the market unit wise (less than 10%?). They are actually not dominating the industry, they are a niche player (but very successful at that, as seen profit wise, especially compared to their competitors). They are also really good at being a premium phone maker, and have leveraged a lot of other core competencies (look up on Wikipedia for more about that concept) well such as their software competencies and their ecosystem thinking (locking their users into their ecosystem and providing most key parts of that ecosystem).
So what about Tesla? They are hardly as good as Apple premium wise. The market for premium is also a lot smaller for cars, especially if you move upwards from where Tesla is right now. It's also very hard to make a profit in that market, and most make a profit by combining a mass scale operation (more or less all premium car brands are owned by one of the big car companies). So is (more) premium a great direction for Tesla? I doubt it. It will hinder economies of scale which have proven difficult to not have.
So, unless Tesla partner up, don't believe electric car engines/drive trains will become commoditized in the near future and/or have some significant premium/lock-in/ecosystem stuff up their sleeve, it looks like budget is the way to go... They might stay in the premium but not luxury segment, but it's cut throat with lots of competition. To me that sounds like a lost opportunity and waste of some significant base innovation.
And... I guess above is why Tesla seems to desperately try to find additional competitive barriers; self driving, fully automated manufacturing, quick charge network, etc. But, they are long shots so far. It's difficult to innovate one area, very much so multiple areas simultaneously.