Electric? Drive up, work out which of the dozen of apps there are, try to download it, hold your phone in the other hand to try to get a signal, finally download it, then register, sell your personal data, then finally you can try to work out how to charge your car.
Even on Tesla's newer dispensers: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yflZN0dLT8s
It's true that North America still has a long way to go on EV infrastructure, but it will get there eventually.
It's a very simple change for all manufacturers.
Here are interviews with various charger makers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbPa6nO6GyM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfyO-o85U-8
Alpitronic and Kempower make the best chargers.
Don't get confused by the branding.
It's true that North America should have standardized a plug and charging standard a long time ago so drivers aren't in a situation where they have to waste money on adapters just to charge their car.
Europe has much better EV infrastructure today in part because manufacturers have been able to build to a common standard and have it work across all brands. That standardization has driven investment, development, and deployment.
Tesla has more 'self supervised' driving data than any other car brand, so if data is key to making self driving work, they win. You could also see how this is a winner take all monopoly once self driving gets cracked.
Now before I get flamed, I don't own Tesla stock, and no I don't think self driving is just around the corner. I'm perfectly happy with good autopilot though and I think the model 3 is a great mid level car. But yes I think Tesla stock was quite over valued.
… _Why_, though? Even if you buy the idea that Tesla is going to come out with self-driving cars Any Day Now(TM), that really seems like the underpants gnome part of the narrative. It’s most unclear why it would be a winner takes all thing.
It is big enough market that eventually there will be multiple-players and then it will be race to bottom. Marginal profits. Self-driving taxis will be dumped like Uber and Lyft did against other players. And then it will be low margin business.
Meanwhile once you reach full self driving, you're stuck at diminishing returns. Doubling your data won't double that: at best you could make a very marginal improvement to safety stats or range economy. Maybe with a lot of lobbying you could swing a slightly higher Tesla-only speed limit, but double self driving isn't a thing. Everything else in the car is commodity stuff like sound systems and seat heaters then anyone with a car factory and a team of designers and a copy of the Bosch Automotive Handbook can do if they want to. Probably you could get some network effects from the "Rent your Tesla out" app, but again, that's an option for anyone with a team of designers once the self-driving part is done and they'll be in the disruption phase and aggressively undercutting as best they can.
This also assumes that in 2029 you can't just use 80% (again... just a random number) synthetic training data and leapfrog nearly all of those hard-won physical miles. The costs of doing that will plummet too, so the training cost moat will only shrink as well.
Meanwhile Tesla will be ossifying as gigantic trillion dollar behemoths tend to do and accruing costs like pensions, and management entrenching will be in its third decade and so on.
Is Tesla worth a lot? Undoubtedly. Is it that much? Questionable. But then the market disagrees, so what do I know (but also the market was off by 30% by it's own estimation so how much does it really know?)
You could use the same argument for search, operating systems, or public cloud as well? "Why couldn't a more nimble or well funded company come in and commoditize {software industry}"
I'm not sure, but we only have two major app stores, we only have three big public clouds, we only have three companies making major operating systems for consumer devices, two search engines, I could go on.
I think that marginal benefit that comes from first mover and scale really makes it hard to catch up in the world of software. Big tech is not afraid to use rapidly rising stock to retain talent, which makes it very hard for startups to acquire comparable talent unless VCs are willing to throw gobs of money at companies, that then go to exorbitant comp. (and you see this in the bull market run of 2015-2022).
They're David going against the Goliath of "the dinosaurs", "legacy auto".
And then their fans like to remind people of their (IMHO laughable) Goliath market cap. You know, the market cap that says Tesla is worth more than: Toyota, Volkwagen Group, Hyundai/Kia, General Motors, Ford, Nissan, Honda, Fiat Chrysler, Renault, Suzuki, Daimler, BMW, Mazda and Mitsubishi. COMBINED. But wait, there's more, also worth more than all of these AND several Chinese manufacturers: SAID, Geely, Changan, Dongfeng.