| Making an EV is easy. I can buy a Power Wheels EV for $400. Making a good EV is hard. The set of technologies required is still unknown -- bear with me for a little bit. In the early days of the PC; anyone competent could make a perfectly competitive computer in their own garage in a few months, buying chips, etching PCBs, and coding up a basic operating system. Wozniak did that, as did a few others. It seemed like it'd be simple forever, but it wasn't. Today, the tech tree to make something like a MacBook is long, wide, and extensive. There's a massive engineering team for the mechanical design alone, let alone the OS or the CPU. I can still make a computer, but it won't be competitive. Same thing happened with airplanes; shortly after the Wright Brothers, all sorts of amateurs made basic planes on their farms. It's still possible to do that, but you won't be competitive with an Airbus jetliner. Early radios were a few vacuum tubes. Compare that to making a modern cell phone. Part of the reason ICE vehicles are complex are the same process. The first mass-produced ICE vehicle, the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, was pretty simple. It cost under $5000 in today's dollars ($150 at the time), and looked like a glorified tricycle with an engine. If you throw engineers at tech, it goes up in sophistication. People figure out how to do things better. Anyone can make an EV. I'm confident, though, that we'll see the same progression as we did in every other fields. If Tesla has enough of a head start making things cheaper and better -- and they seem to -- it's unlikely the established players will be able to compete. |