Yet instead of providing a template for followers, Tesla increasingly appears a one-off, a feat of automotive alchemy that can’t be neatly replicated. These plug-in newbies saw Tesla as their spirit guide. From Lordstown Motors to Nikola and Faraday Future, once-starry-eyed companies are seeing market valuations evaporate as they struggle to ramp up production and secure funding in a brutal, inflationary economy. Born in seemingly limitless EV promise, electric startups are struggling or foundering as the easy money dries up and automaking reality rears its head. That hard-earned reality check actually faces every EV startup today.
VinFast knows they’re going to have to do better, much better, to compete against Tesla-as well as those massively capitalized incumbents named above. Tesla increasingly appears a one-off, a feat of automotive alchemy that can’t be neatly replicated.ĭriving the new electric VinFast VF8 last month near San Diego certainly elicits some empathy toward this EV startup-in this case, a hyperambitious Vietnamese automaker. Yet with Ford going all-in to close the cost gap but expected to lose about $3 billion in its EV operations this year, the question for relatively speck-size startups has become unavoidable: At what point does being late to the game and trying to keep up become just too little, too late? None of this necessarily prevents any innovative EV startup from entering the fray and somehow becoming the next Tesla. Now Tesla is looking to ensure that dominance, cutting even more costs, building a new factory in Mexico, slashing vehicle prices by $5,000 on average, ratcheting up pressure on Ford, GM, Hyundai, Volkswagen, and others.
That company is of course Tesla, as Ford CEO Jim Farley humbly acknowledged in his recent, public pas de deux with Elon Musk. Imagine an automotive marketplace where one company can build an electric car for US $10,000 less than Ford, the company that merely invented the assembly line and mass production.
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