Comment by panick21_

> Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing. Tesla has a massive amount of capital, if they put it into reducing and scaling manufacturing of vehicles and batteries, I think they could probably win.

This is a very wrong way to tell the story.

Tesla + Panasonic were the first to commit to a massive factor car cells with very advanced chemistry. But this advantage didn't hold long as the model was soon copied.

And at that point, when that investment happened Tesla did actually not have 'a massive amount of capital'. And Panasonic also didn't, and even more so, Panasonic didn't want to go all in on batteries. As they were a company from Japan that still believed in the Hydrogen future.

By the time Tesla had serious capital, the other battery companies had long shot past Tesla+Panasonic and it wasn't even close.

Claiming that Panasonic and Tesla can win now is just silly and based on nothing.

Tesla was actually pretty clever on this and invested rather a large amount in their own battery supply chain. And they spun up a whole battery supply chain pretty quickly. But arguably they were a bit two ambitious. Musk really pushed the boundary with the cells, introducing or trying to introduce a lot of things that were hard to do and simply took time. They should have started more conservatively first and only tried to innovated once they could match the other companies on the standard process.

There was no chance for them to be a massive battery supplier to the outside, but making their own batteries for their own cars and getting better margin then all the other companies was well within the cards. And that by itself is a win.

But overall their battery strategy wasn't really the problem. They did a lot of good things there. And things that can pay off over time. The problem was to much investment in stuff other then batteries and their car models. The most important thing for them was to have growing volume every year. Work on manufacturing improvements and fight on margins.

But as you say, I agree the focus on driverless was a mistake.