Tesla is building their own battery packs, but they're still buying the cells from Panasonic, just like everyone else (Apple included) has the option to do.
And their first gigafactory in Nevada as far as I know has been producing cells for years. I suspect they stopped buying cells from Panasonic years ago.
[0]https://www.tesla.com/blog/panasonic-enters-supply-agreement...
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Automobiles/Panasonic-to-bo...
If that vertical integration translated to a marked, obvious benefit to customers, then I'd agree. But I don't think it does. Certainly your average EV buyer is not going to say "I bought my Tesla because Tesla makes their own batteries". Why would a customer care about that? I certainly wouldn't.
Not when you look at their margins.
Tesla's special sauce is that they can make a profitable, desirable EV at scale. The established players can't ramp their EV programs -- they'd go bankrupt! I wouldn't call that "working well enough."
The dinosaurs failed to innovate for decades, while Tesla sat down and did hard engineering.
Look at BMWs and Mercedes margins. They're quite comparable with Tesla margins.
Let's see Tesla margins once they grow to try to match that insane market valuation that only makes sense if they sell 10+ million cars per year, most of which will have to be cars costing 20k€ per year, not 40k+€ per year.
The key words that you missed are "at scale."
It's easy to be profitable at the high end, but that also means a negiligible total addressable market. BMW and Mercedes still have all their R&D work ahead of them to scale their high-cost EV technology to a mass market car.
BMW/Mercedes also didn't do the engineering legwork (like other dinos), they just use a slightly different strategy to conceal the deficiency. Those two companies use "make EVs that won't get popular" instead of "quietly lose money on EVs."
I find especially US folks (sorry) very un-informed about non-US car companies regarding EV technology.
Also, Mercedes sold ~250k EVs last year and BMW sold about ~380k. Yes, Tesla sold 1.8 million or something, but you're acting like Tesla is some hyperscaler. And this is in a context where both BMW and Mercedes sell more cars overall, than Tesla, so they have to take care of the going concern, too.
A lot of wishful thinking in that comment.
Doing some quick googling I could not find any source for margins of BMW / Mercedes on their EVs. I remember EVs fron GM / WV being mostly unprofitable, but maybe those are old news.
Can you please share some links for those who want to be more informed?
Of course I know they "have" platforms, but look at the price of the actual cars. They're at least a generation behind Tesla on platform cost.
Legacy automakers' dirty little secret is that their cheap EVs aren't profitable, and their profitable EVs aren't cheap. They failed to invest in lowering EV build costs.
I find non-Tesla/non-China automakers (including Europe) very in denial about how far behind they are.
Manufacturing of both cars and batteries. That's vertical integration. While I think their current overselling of Autopilot is going to be a folly for them, their assistive driving suite alone would be a multi billion dollar business. They have taken on a ton of risk, and they certainly have their problems, but their successes are substantial and are nothing to wave away.