No, basically nobody had expensive luxury electric cars before Tesla. This is more what Faraday Future was trying to do - be late to the game and copy, maybe change a few details to try to marginally improve it.

What Tesla did is more like what Apple did - massively expand the "smart phone" segment in the first place.

If you compare the Essential phone to a V30, S8, or Pixel, there's nothing anything near the difference of comparing an iPhone to a Nokia N95. Something that is so compelling it makes you not care about the other things the iPhone doesn't have that the Nokia does, like GPS and 3G. Similarly the Model S vs a 7 series: one has more bells and whistles, one is a fundamentally different product that a lot of people not very interested in the old option find much more compelling.

"No, basically nobody had expensive luxury electric cars before Tesla."

But high end luxury cars were a thing. Tesla wasn't competing with just electric cars, they were competing with all cars.

Tesla would have gone precisely nowhere with a mass market luxury gas burner. Established brands had that market pretty much locked up and beating them on quality when starting from scratch is basically impossible.

Small players in this market have to go to the ultra-niche extremes where you sell like 20 cars a year for millions of dollars per and usually still lose money.

The electric drive was the killer feature on the Tesla. Without it the car has no reason to exist.

Also, by luxury car standards the interior of a Tesla is absolutely subpar. They were competing against cars with handcrafted mahogany dashboards and precision stitched leather seats where people will spend hours and days fine tuning the static and moving resistance on the heater control knob to get it just perfect.

But their strategy was still go to after the high end market, instead of try to target the low end market and go up.

That is true, and it works because there is a market for high end vehicles. The market is there because the high end companies make a product that is measurably better than the mass market product from traditional manufacturers.

Such a thing really isn't possible in the cell phone market. A tiny shop can't build a phone notably better than an iPhone or a Galaxy. The only luxury phone provider I know about just glued diamonds on old dumbphones and went out of business.

Essential was apparently banking on people finding the modularity concept to be a killer feature worth a price premium, but that has not been the case apparently.

Not initially, no. The all electric drive-train and buying into the future was always the key hook for early adopters. I think a large part of early demand was not because it was the best car for the money, but because it was special, unique, and you believed in Tesla the company and wanted it to succeed.

yeah, but they did something new/different. In terms of margins it is always better to serve the high end.

Hypothetical car analogies are imprecise enough already.