And how long did it take Tesla? It feels like these giant automakers are just slow and old fashioned

From a glance at wikipedia, Tesla took 5 years (2003 to 2008) from founding to (limited) production of the Roadster, and were under no expectation to get money or build other cars during that time. Then they built what appears to be a total of 2400 of them.

The Model S was announced in 2012 as their first "mass produced" road car (and they don't appear to have broken 100K cars in a year until ~2017), so that's 15 years to get anywhere near the scale of a grown-up car manufacturer.

To reiterate, they didn't have to support other production in any of that time, and they didn't have to make any sort of profit during any of that time.

To compare, Audi spits out ~2m cars a year, and can't just stop selling cars to retool their factories.

...

9 years? Tesla was founded in 2003 and released the Model S in 2012.

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about 15 years to get to the monthly volume that the A4, 6, and 8 are manufactured.

Some would say that Tesla is still learning how to put together a car.

And it turns out that knowing how to put together a car wasn’t a prerequisite to launching. :)

Yeah, you just have to convince you that doors that are so misaligned that they eat into the paint is normal.

Their sales tell us that they don’t have to do that, apparently!

Audi sells almost four times the number of cars that Tesla sells annually, and in my opinion it's likely that we will see some ICE models sold alongside EVs as the world slowly transitions away from gasoline engines.

Also, Tesla's growth is not an overnight story.