The smartphone parallel is what I was thinking of. More particularly the transition from dumb phone, to smart phone, Tha basically destroyed most of the incumbents.

I take it you're saying Tesla is Apple. Perhaps, you don't have the network effects and lock in with cars, that you do with phones, and Tesla don't seem to make 'the best' hardware like Apple do, but I don't have a crystal ball either, so I won't argue.

> you don't have the network effects and lock in with cars

Maybe charging stations is the network effect, Tesla has lot stations across the US so you know you wont run out of juice on your trip.

Are we going to still have branded charging stations going forward ?

It sounds a bit insane to have stations where you can get fuel for a mercedes but not a kia.

Agree but to be fair it was Tesla who actually made electric cars popular and desirable and built all the charging stations for their cars so it does not make sense for them to give services to other electric cars unless some law forces them to do so.

It will probably necessitate a legislation for this but once electric cars become dominant it looks like having battery standards will be necessary.

Good point.

I wonder what the situation is in China. My impression in Europe and America everyone but Tesla had standardised on one charger.

A top level commenter mentioned Geely-owned London Taxi Company is building electrified black cabs. Geely also happens to own Volvo: I think an electric Volvo will do very well in the high-end against Tesla.

Also, if China decides it needs extra EV battery capacity, expect the total number to significantly increase, and Tesla's slice will shrink (in relative terms).

Volvo's ex-performance brand, polestar, is being spun off into a hybrid and electric only manufacturer. They are starting off with the Polestar 1, a hybrid sports coupe, but after that, the polestar 2 and polestar 3 are planned to be electric (sedan and suv, respectively). Polestar 1 will be out of reach for most ($150k), as well as being in a coupe form factor. its competitors will likely be honda NSX, and maybe DB11 or R8. But it will be interesting to see how Polestars future products do.

Car technology always filters down from high-end models to daily drivers over time - today the tech will be in Polestar, in 5 years, it will be in Volvo's generic platform covering several models. Even Tesla kicked things off with the expensive roadster and the tech filtered to cheaper cars, and this follows a long tradition (power steering, airbags, traction control, cruise control were all premium models features at some point but are now standard)

> Right now, Tesla consumes more than 60% of the world EV batteries

Not sure where you heard that but that is completely false. BYD alone shipped over 100,000 electric cars (not including buses) in the third quarter (compared to Tesla's 83,000). Other Chinese car companies BAIC, Rowe, and Geel all ship over 20k+ plug-ins per quarter.

I think that's referring to total energy capacity and not the number of battery packs.

Tesla's luxury vehicles ship with 75/90/100kWh packs while BYD's model seem to have 63kWh (not accounting for busses which seems to have about 325kWh). No definite information available for Model 3, afaik, but I heard that the long range version has a 75kWh pack (50kWh for the "normal range" model?).

I've heard it. Eg https://www.inverse.com/article/47731-tesla-gigafactory-now-...

But yeah I'm not sure whether China doesn't report battery construction, or under reports or what because it sounds suspect to me also.

> It’s official: Tesla Gigafactory is now the largest annual producer of battery power in the automotive world

Official according to who? I suspect that, like much of the less critical reporting on Tesla, it's just reprinting a press release. In any case, that doesn't match the headline; it's just claiming it's the single biggest factory. There's no substantiation of the headline at all, and looking at the numbers it cannot be true.

Well theres a tweet from Tesla which is the original source I guess.

And you may have noticed how the internet gets, when Tesla/Elon says something that isn't true, so I guess theres some basis to it.

The Tesla fanboyism goes both ways, there are many, many people waiting to point out they are wrong.