As a non-engineer, I don’t see anything there that other auto companies couldn’t copy pretty easily. I’m sure there would be a bit of a learning curve putting large, comprehensive castings into production. But that’s certainly not an insurmountable moat around the business.
There is only one fallacy in the above “pretty easily.” It fails to take into account the sunk costs that people and organizations anchor on and the tendency of people not to like change. In The Gorilla Game the technical term used is “switching costs.”
VW fired Herbert Diess because he was advocation too much or too fast change. That’s what keeps most incumbents from switching gears. Labor unions are also a factor, they don’t like people being fired.
It’s more than just engineering, it’s the human factor.
The Captain