[grecy]

I honestly think it's because they started with an entirely clean slate.

They didn't go into this saying "We're going to design a new vehicle, but it has to be built using the same factories and tooling and processes we've poured a few hundred billion dollars into."

Also remember the large auto manufacturers have hundreds of millions of R&D sunk into internal combustion engines they still need decades to re-coup.

I got a tour of a massive OEM assembly line in the US this summer, and it was utterly jaw-dropping to see how many people are paid to do the most menial tasks possibly imaginable, that could easily be replaced by a robot. I was told the Union forces those jobs to stay, and they're actually the highest paid in the entire factory.