I mean based on popular understanding, they KNEW they should be figuring out electric cars (and have been!) but:

1- Oil companies pressured the industry/government to keep supporting their platform 2- Most car companies didn't consider themselves battery companies, which Tesla obviously is. They sell the product "cars" not so much the underlying technologies that make them function. Thinking of Tesla as a car company and not a battery/energy company is a misunderstanding of where they spend their energy. It's like thinking Google is a search engine and not an adverting/information brokerage company.

The other car companies have been researching and investing in EVs, emerging battery chemistries, and autonomous driving for over a decade. At their scale, they can't exactly build a business on 500k vehicles per year. That doesn't mean they aren't poised for market entry as the infrastructure matures and demand grows.