Well, it doesn't bet that they'll "fail" exactly. It's simply betting that they aren't going to grow. The collective opinion of Wall Street is that the only value to owning Toyota or GM or Volkswagen stock is the immediate value: dividend payments, the value of liquidatable assets, etc...

But with Tesla, the bet is that in 30 years that company is going to own most of the market all these existing firms do. That may be wrong, but like I said it's clear that this is the bet.