My prediction has always been that all traditional car manufacturers will jump into the market with gusto at the next inflection point in battery technology.
The current state of the art battery technology for vehicles is heavy and has less than desirable energy density.
The minute a new technology can deliver twice the energy density at the same or lower weight and lower cost most established car manufacturers will jump in.
Electric cars are very easy to build when compared to IC cars. The simplest fact being that you are eliminating thousands of mechanical components and replacing them with an electric motor and hundreds (or thousands?) of electronic components (for motor control). Electronics design and manufacturing is easier, cheaper and faster than mechanical manufacturing.
I believe Tesla is positioned to take a big hit when that inflection point happens. They are inexorably married to a battery technology. The Gigafactory, as awesome as it might be, is now a large ship with huge mass that is very difficult to turn around.
The next battery technology might very well turn the Gigafactory into a huge anchor for a few years, during which all other car manufacturers, lacking that commitment, are likely to leave Tesla in the dust.
When that change comes the other players will have the problem that they too will need to build some sort of Gigafactory. There is no way they can do a rushed attack against Tesla on this. These guys are slow movers not willing to take big risks. When this battery technology switch happens I am pretty sure Tesla will actually be the first to move. They will have more experience with large scale battery production than the competition.
It isn't just about cells but putting them together and designing a whole battery, with cooling and everything. Tesla knows very well how to do this. The competition doesn't.
They could also buy from the gigafactory, just like Apple buys components from Samsung (their competitor within, particularly, the mobile market). Google licensed their search engine to Yahoo and others.
Tesla is not in a position to replace Ford and others, and they won't be for several years. Even then, they won't be in a position to displace anyone in anything other than consumer vehicles. They have no truck and no announcement for a truck. They have no busses. They have no heavy equipment.
New battery tech takes a long time to being to market. Once an innovation is shown to be viable in a lab, there's a long gauntlet of stress tests to run--different operating loads under different environmental conditions. There's no market surprise to be had that's going to catch your competitors off-guard.
> Electric cars are very easy to build when compared to IC cars.
As I commented above, I recommend reading about the development of the Volt and Bolt at GM. They had a huge learning curve:
> Nearly everything changes when you opt for a fundamentally different power train, so GM’s greatest advantage—more than a century of experience building cars—was all but moot.
I don't really know about the gigafactory, but it seems logic that a % of it is dedicated to R&D and growth. Plus, this battery tech doesn't create itself, if I remember reading correctly Tesla is making some advancements in here as well.
I think the error in this thinking is in assuming that the market leader will be the source of the next step change in innovation. This is covered very well in the book "The Innovator's Dilemma". Bottom line, this is seldom the case. If the inflection point in battery technology comes from an outfit Tesla does not control they could be in trouble. All other car manufacturers will simply go off and buy these new better batteries while Tesla will have to figure out what to do with a factory that can't produce them and, perhaps, never will because they won't have command of the tech.
On the other hand, I'd guess there's a "small" window of a couple of years for a real breakthrough+production outside of Tesla to affect them. Seeing the history of batteries and incremental improvements for the last 20? years, it'd be pretty rare for it to happen now.
Some other car manufacturers could do this intantly. Nissan has the best selling electric car (Leaf) on the market and Toyota has some kick ass hybrid engines (that's an electric engine AND a combustion engine) available for most of their cars. If they decided that battery only cars is the way to go they could switch from one day to the other. But they don't.
The current state of the art battery technology for vehicles is heavy and has less than desirable energy density.
The minute a new technology can deliver twice the energy density at the same or lower weight and lower cost most established car manufacturers will jump in.
Electric cars are very easy to build when compared to IC cars. The simplest fact being that you are eliminating thousands of mechanical components and replacing them with an electric motor and hundreds (or thousands?) of electronic components (for motor control). Electronics design and manufacturing is easier, cheaper and faster than mechanical manufacturing.
I believe Tesla is positioned to take a big hit when that inflection point happens. They are inexorably married to a battery technology. The Gigafactory, as awesome as it might be, is now a large ship with huge mass that is very difficult to turn around.
The next battery technology might very well turn the Gigafactory into a huge anchor for a few years, during which all other car manufacturers, lacking that commitment, are likely to leave Tesla in the dust.