For the first time I heard a car company CEO actually get that Tesla is different. The CEO of Toyota made a comment that what Tesla builds is more akin to the iPhone than a car.
And he's right. Tesla builds a computer that happens to use a very large battery, weighs about 4,000 lbs, and has wheels.
Nobody else in the business gets this. They think Tesla is just a car company with an electric motor, while completely ignoring the speed at which Tesla is able to roll out improvements.
I've said for a while that until the car companies start thinking like a software company, they'll be further and further behind. The difference is (quite literally) a company with a multi-year long effort to roll out a new version versus a company running the automotive equivalent of Scrum.
An expedition, for example, is a great rig. I own one, and it's used for a lot of different purposes. I can't really replace it reasonably, and they run well for a very long time.
I would consider another with an electric assist option.
I collected gas use data for a few months. Mpg could be doubled in that vehicle for a modest weight increase that could likely be significantly offset with a weight reduction in other areas.
Hybrid vehicles in the larger weight classes makes a lot of sense. Serms to me Ford would get a ton of expertise and gain relevance while adding a ton of value.
Tesla owns the world's largest battery factory.
We are not talking about toy motors. Before Tesla who knew about making a car motor which can reach 0-60 in 2.27 seconds?
https://www.hemmings.com/blog/2015/06/17/electric-mustang-re...
Here's a Datsun 1200 with a 1.8 second 0-60:
https://www.geek.com/geek-cetera/worlds-fastest-electric-car...
That one was built twenty-three years ago!
Tesla's achievement isn't the 0-60 time itself, but rather doing so in a car that 1) is a practical daily driver family car 2) will withstand a couple hundred thousand miles of driving without replacing major components 3) is safe and robust enough to put into the hands of thousands of ordinary consumers and 4) can be manufactured for a cost that is not entirely ludicrous.
Which is impressive, but unrelated to the motor. In fact, the rear motor in the P100D is the same as the one in my 85 and essentially the same as the one that was in the original 2012 Model S, and the front motor is just a smaller, less powerful version.
The main innovations which enabled this are related to the battery pack, not the motors. Most of that innovation is cutting costs. It's really easy to get a lot of power out of a large battery pack, and Tesla's cheap batteries means they can put large ones in their cars without completely blowing the cost up. They just about maxed this out with the P85D, which did 0-60 in around 3 seconds. At that point they started to be limited by the amount of current that the battery's fuses could handle. They got past that problem by using a "smart" pyrotechnic fuse instead of the traditional melty-metal kind, resulting in "ludicrous mode" on the P85D and P90D. Then the P100D bumps it up a bit more just by virtue of having a larger battery.
How many Teslas out there with > 100K miles and how many with > 200K miles?
Even the other difficult problems like dealing with starting current, construction, heat, and lifetime have been solved many ways for a long time.
Likewise, Tesla isn't really an electric car company or even an electric motor company. Electric motors are something everyone's known how to make for a hundred years and they actually get a lot of their generic car bits like their interiors from the same companies who supply traditional car companies. Tesla's actually a battery pack company (this is why the PowerPack and the SolarCity merger makes sense). It's the knowledge and the experience that went into those packs that keeps other companies from easily copying Tesla.
The problem Ford and any traditional automaker faces is somehow pivoting from their current secret sauce, which took them decades and billions of dollars to develop, to a new one in a field that's completely unrelated, where almost nothing they already know applies.