Tesla's big advantage is that most other car makers have publicly ridiculed electric cars [1] and heavily promoted the roar of gasoline engines [2]. Electric car sales are widely expected overtake gasoline cars in the next 30 years [3]. Recently, car makers have had to eat their words in the wake of dieselgate [4]. Old school car makers will have to retrain their audience to embrace electric cars [5]. Meanwhile, Tesla benefits from being an early adopter.
Also, don't forget, regarding that thing about the "roar" of gasoline engines, that some car makers have opted to fake the sound of the engine's noise with audio systems. [0]
Yeah, it's a trade between experience and authenticity. If you value the experience for its own novelty and stimulation, the fakery isn't a problem. Those who seek authenticity derive pleasure from a completely different source and rationale.
> Electric car sales are widely expected overtake gasoline cars in the next 30 years
I'd go one step further WRT trends in the next 30 years. Sales won't matter much and car ownership is going to nosedive. Self-driving cars make too much sense as shared resources and are wasteful to own individually. Electric vehicles, absent the expense of an actual driver, are just way too inexpensive. Internal combustion engines, by comparison, have a lot higher TCO on a per-mile basis. We're seeing the nascent stages of the AWSification of automobiles. Today's cost considerations for automobiles are currently MSRP/monthly payment, $/gal gas, $/mo insurance and $/service. In the future, only $/mi will matter and Tesla/Google are best equipped to comfortably break $0.10/mi/passenger.
Tesla is building towards a future where dealers, customer preference and the entire sales process is largely obsolete. Traditional car companies have a lot invested in these areas. They have diverse lineups of vehicles (economy, sedan, crossovers, SUVs, etc) targeting all consumer preferences. Their chief advantages are in matching consumer desire for vehicle type, manufacturing that diverse lineup of vehicles, and distributing them to consumers.
Tesla is building towards a future where none of that matters. Where no matter whether I want to go across town or the entire state, I pull out my phone and hire a car. The color and style of the car don't matter. The range and charging time of the car don't matter...there will be intermediate charging locations along the way where a fully-charged car is waiting to resume the journey (think modern day post horses.)
And his vehicles just drive off the assembly line and into service with no intermediate sales process. Just running some SWAG numbers, if he can get to a $25k/vehicle with a useful life of around 5 years and around 400k miles @ $0.025/mi in electricity costs and those miles average half-full occupancy at $0.10/mi, each car will return around $45k in profit over those 5 years, or roughly 23% annual rate of return. For as many vehicles as he can churn out. That's a lot of money, especially considering many of those numbers are really conservative. As a consumer, run your own numbers on a $/mi basis with amortized purchase price/lease cost, gas, insurance and service factored in. It'll be much higher than $0.10/mi, so Tesla will probably have room to charge even more.
And I believe Musk's vision goes beyond that too...with his Boring Company, he'll be building congestion-free conduits full of nothing but self-driving vehicles to all but guarantee travel times. If you think about our road networks like our internet networks, he'd be building an Akamai- or Google-like CDN where only the last-mile traverses the public network and the long haul is private.
If you're looking for a reason to be long on Tesla despite all the money they're burning now, this vision is it. I believe that traditional car companies are myopically focused on building the kinds of cars that tomorrow's consumers will want to buy while Musk is focused on getting tomorrows customers to where they want to go. One of these visions is going to be very wrong and Tesla's makes more sense to me.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/americas-bes...