Car companies have always been build engines and assembly of body organizations, buying other parts from whoever. Each is a bit different but nothing new about not owning all the technology. If it isn't a competitive advantage why bother?
I appreciate your comment on competitive advantage. What would it be in Tesla's case? It's not really the car design or assembly. I know they tried to play "disrupt" games with throwing software at the production line but I understand it didn't go well.
Couple things that come to mind:
1) SV software culture, kinda coming from Musk. This helps with battery pack management (important), electric motor control (important) and fancy car UI (less important perhaps but a "cool" factor. I think I count autopilot here)
2) Skin in the game. This is a bit meta, but some of the things they've done take some real guts and leadership. In their case it was do-or-die. Things like charger network, or getting the cars sold without dealerships, or building their own battery factory, or maybe the very idea of a production EV. I don't see this with incumbents - even if they have EV lines they could probably shut them down without much impact. Maybe this will not last long, I guess VW promised to switch to all electric new platforms? At that point they are kinda committed.
I think it partly is the car design. They were the first manufacturer trying to make a mainstream car which was designed from the ground up to take advantage of being a BEV (for example with batteries flat under the floor). Others always based their electric car upon an existing ICE design despite the ensuing compromises.
This is super important. Most ICE vendors tried to take an existing vehicle, remove the ICE components and shoehorn in an electric motor. Tesla really nailed the “ground up” design (a drag coefficient of 0.24 was almost unbelievable when the model S debuted) and even now the other makers haven’t really caught up.
