To all of us who support the Tesla mission it is quite relevant to have huge success from at least several participants for every part of global transition to sustainable energy.
Thus I, like Elon Musk, hope for others to succeed. Tesla is only as successful as is the global adoption of renewable energy and BEVs. He has been very clearly disappointed in slow and minimal adoption.
For that reason I hold that the rapid development and success of Chinese BEVs is a rare case of widespread industrial support to Tesla’s aims.
We might even think of analogies. Was there ever a global transition that depended on only one company?
Cases from Singer, Colt, Ford, and so on, all were prime movers of new technologies, as is E. Musk.
None invented the things they perfected, although their roles were fundamental to wide adoption.
Thinking for the Tesla mission we should recall how important Elon has repeatedly emphasized how important wide adoption really is.
Bluntly, Tesla can only thrive when BEVs become popular as utility level storage has done, as utility level photovoltaics and wind power have become. Tesla is thriving in those too, but si not the single largest player in some fo it.
To imagine Tesla must command the total market or even the dominant share is to suggest the total market will not successfully compete. Should that dominance continue a decade from now Tesla will have been a failure, commanding a huge share of a small market.
Giving competitors access to Superchargers is only the first step. Tesla is also helping battery suppliers learn how to improve, by buying from all the good ones and helping them do better.
CATL and BYD are just the beginning also. It’s instructive that Mr. Musk knows both and actively helps them. It serves Tesla narrow and long term goals at the same time. That SAIC and others help teach legacy OEMs how to produce BEVs is also serving the Tesla mission.
So, yes, the Chinese are important. They may well be the only significant participants to be learning what they need to learn to help the world transition to sustainable energy.
Most of us are ready to write off all the legacy OEMs. Directly, that is probably correct. However, several of the least likely are learning , reluctantly, from the Chinese.
One early obvious example was that only Chinese owned IDRA could muster the capital expense and time to build a 6000 tom press. Bühler, certainly the preferred vendor, refused. What happened? Bühler changed their outlook quickly and became deeply committed themselves. That may seem irrelevant. I don’t think so. Soon even BMW will see they’ve missed the manufacturing revolution.
In my opinion, there are three impediments to widespread success. 1) Legacy OEM need to seriously feel pain beginning with Toyota and BMW. 2) Labor unions need to understand their options. 3) Governments need to become serious quickly. All three are strained now, whether their stakeholders can see it or not.
The realization will become acute once they all see that BEV building can be and is, cheaper than ICE.
With evolving battery technology, new better materials (i.e. cheaper and more effective), and gigantic presses all the pieces will be nearly complete. It’s very, very close now. The final piece is one that Tesla now has, an effective ‘factory operating system’. In my opinion that last piece will begin just as soon as Geico-Taikihsa: