Is big better? Sometimes there is a new situation that only small adaptive organizations can capitalize on. The military analogy that I think of is how in WWII, a 60,000 strong German force in Panzers and near-obsolete Stuka dive-bombers routed a 3.5mm strong French and British force. The French and British didn't understand how to conduct modern maneuverability warfare, and some of the Germans did [1]. The auto industry might be similar. It's not just a question of which engine do we put in there. The auto industry as a whole is a political/economic engine built around complex machines that need maintenance, salespeople that can upsell because of product complexity, a product where supply-chain management skills are dominant because of product complexity...

When big new opportunities like this arise, it is often the small players that do well. If it wasn't the case, the technology industry would have been dominated by incumbents like IBM, instead of upstarts like Microsoft and Apple.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Nazi-War-Machine-Blitzkrieg/dp...