But I'm not including PHEV as those are a very different supply chain.
> the margin is not insurmountably large
Mhh sorry what?
Look at how tiny Ford is. And you have to understand that Ford was very, very late at doing battery partnership. Their battery factories are very late. So they will not scale very fast the next 3-5 years because of battery constraints.
At the same time, GM on this diagram looks way larger then it is in reality. The reason GM looks big is because of one tiny China only micro-car that yields almost no profit and will never be exported (and sales have gone down this year already). Their actual Ultium sales are barley existing.
You keep thinking these companies are so much bigger then Tesla, they are not. Ford and GM have less then 2x the revenue of Tesla. Tesla has faster growth and less debt and less aging infrastructure (they have brand new factories) and now legacy business. In terms of available capital Tesla can actually deploy far more, and raise money far more then Ford or GM.
Let me give you an example, Volkswagen. The ID.3 is comparable to the Model 3 and it came out in 2019. It was part of their MEB platform, something they had majority invested years before that. In 2018 they said they would invest 50 billion $ and have since increased that. Clearly they matched Tesla in spending for the last 8 years or so. And yet look at the chart, they have half the BEV sales of Tesla. And Volkswagen is consider very successful in the EV world.
You vastly underestimate how hard it is to transition to EV. Just because Ford, GM, Honda and so on are bigger then Tesla, does not magically mean they can just start mass producing EV. Go at actually look at how hard it is to scale, even for large companies with huge ability to invest.
> (Ford, GM) truly change
Have you looked at Ford and GM own predictions. Because you seem to have a higher opinion on these companies then they themselves have.
Ford just talked about how they would be losing money for many more years and then only just match what Tesla is doing just now.
Large companies often over promise what they can do. But you actually go beyond that and claim that they under promised and will do significantly better then they themselves believe.
Of course GM just learn a hard lessen with their initial battery factory, scaling is hard and that why Ultium had almost no sales in Q1.