Isn't there a good chance they'd just mothball the whole company and keep on making regular gasoline-engine cars?

Toyota already has plug-in cars that use lithium batteries. They'd probably merge Tesla into Lexus and open the Supercharger network to anyone who could pay.

Have to wonder if Toyota still have the keys to the NUMMI plant.

> Isn't there a good chance they'd just mothball the whole company and keep on making regular gasoline-engine cars?

All of those companies - and the entire industry - are investing heavily in their own electric cars; some already have announced dates when they will stop production of gas engines IIRC. Depending on the price, of course, I imagine they'd love to add Tesla's prestige, patents, and maybe their talent.

My uneducated guess is that's how Tesla will end, a division of a major car-maker. When did GM last add a new brand? Imagine the bidding.

Toyota/GM/Ford/VW/etc did not become big, successful corporations by dictating to consumers what they want to buy.

No, but they might be able to remain big, successful corporations by preventing consumers from buying anything else.

That kind of collusion is not only overtly illegal, but also extremely difficult to maintain, especially worldwide.

It's certainly illegal, and it might be difficult to maintain, but I'd argue that it happens quite often across many industries, and very well could happen here.

You described it indirectly but end result is same.

It would be a lot cheaper, in that case, to not acquire Tesla and just let it collapse.

Understanding car production is less important then for EV then massive battery investment and knowlage, building a integrated brand, global charging infrastructure and so on.

Toyota might be better at building profitable cars, but Tesla is better at building profitable EVs.

I think Tesla's failure at scaling their manufacturing is pretty good evidence against your claim. There are other brands making EVs without the same issues as Tesla.

They have scaled their manufacturing quite well be now. They are not top of the line but the have a real mass production car.

Have you actually looked at the production numbers of those other EVs? Because there is nobody outside of Tesla that has mass produced EV and even more imprtantly, to do it with profit mergin per car.

Teslas are the Top 3 most sold EVs in the US market. The model 3 is by now equaling the sum of all other EVs and is almost 100% of the growth in EVs.

Futhermore, the iPace, i3, Tycan and many others saw production delays as well. So the idea that you can let some established company do it and they will do way better then Tesla has jet to be shown.to be true.

The original Tesla Killer, the Bolt, is outsold by Tesla 15 to 1.

Competitors have announced many EVs but most will hit the market around 2020 and most of them will not produce near as many as the Model 3.

It's impossible to separate the higher demand for Tesla from their higher sales. It's possible that their sales are higher because they can make more, but it seems more likely that their sales are higher because demand for Tesla is so much higher.

What's clear is that we know Tesla has had (and may continue to have) issues with production. Meanwhile I can't find anything suggesting there were any production issues with the Chevy Bolt or Volt or Nissan Leaf, the other models I'm familiar with. I'm not familiar with any of "iPace, i3, Tycan" so I don't know what to look up there to see if there were comparable issues with them.

The Bolt and the Leaf has less production issue because they are far smaller production numbers. Also, we don't have close to as much news about problems in their plants.

Guess why you don't know about them, because they don't sell well or are delayed.

Tesla will always have production issue because they are always trying to grow. Every large company has production issues. The question is how much product can you produce at what price.

Which is part of what would make Tesla a valuable acquisition target.