[ZeroGravitas]

> It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly.

There's a video talk on youtube by one of the original Tesla co-founders, Marc Tarpenning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf15nMnayXk

and his take on it (in amongst lots of other cool info), learned from later consulting for those same companies, was that the car companies outsourced everything but the engine. Then tesla came along, bought all the standard parts (windscreen wipers etc.) from these third party companies, and have no need for ICE engines.

So now you have people, who built their entire corporate status hierarchy around ICE engine experience, trying to start afresh.

[coredog64]

Third party should be in quotes. Visteon, Delphi, Denso et al aren't really what you'd think of when you think third party. They're more of a way to split up parts of the same business for tax/labor advantages.

[jzwinck]

Outsourcing everything but the engine is an interesting concept and I'm sure it applies to some cars. But I have a striking counterexample. The Ford Taurus SHO from the 90s had a Yamaha engine and a Mazda transmission. This was a flagship car, and from its inception Ford outsourced design and manufacture of the main thing that made it unique.