TESLA ISN’T THE FUTURE OF

Mercedes are growing rapidly in Europe eclipsing Tesla in some countries, while Chinese brand BYD has started to outsell the company in China, a key market.

With deadlines for the end of sales of gas powered cars approaching, the electric car is shifting from futuristic specialty item to commodity.

That’s great news for the future of electrification, but it makes Tesla’s aim of differentiation much harder, particularly as its advantage of a proprietary supercharger network gets eroded by growing investment in charging infrastructure.

If it’s not worrying Elon Musk, it’s not showing: he told staff just last month to ignore stock price fluctuations and repeated his assertion that Tesla would go on to become the most valuable company in the world.

But it’s hard to see how Tesla might reach those grand ambitions.

For one, Tesla’s competitors are only at the beginning of their electric vehicle (EV) transition. If another company such as VW, beats Tesla to a car priced more for the mass market, then Tesla will struggle to maintain its huge lead, especially if the expected economic downturn comes to pass and buyers shy away from Tesla’s expensive lineup.

More broadly, Tesla’s huge valuation and the idea that it would utterly dominate was always based on the idea that

Yet, both that dream and the genius of Muck seem far more dubious than they once did. Autonomous driving is a far harder problem than anyone realized, and Musk’s promises of “full self-driving” remain unfulfilled. Tesla’s solar roof tiles never really materialized and the focus on clean energy has all but dissipated.

Meanwhile, Musk’s tenure at Twitter, to make no mention of his tweets, has seriously undermined his reputation as a brilliant visionary. And this is all to say nothing of a growing movement casting doubt on the very idea that a car-centric lifestyle represents the future at all.

Yes, it’s true, in many markets, Tesla still vastly outsells its EV competitors and Tesla customer satisfaction remains the highest in the industry.

Yet even that isn’t a recipe for a world changing company or one that might usurp Apple or Exxon. Rather, it’s simply a model for a car company, a fine one, even a successful one, but just a car company all the same.