Pylimitics

Tesla is not keeping up with the competition, not by a long shot. The real competition in electric vehicles seems to be led by companies in China and South Korea. Tesla, which has always been known for inferior build quality and doesn’t update its offerings very often. The Model X is a decade old. The Model S is even older, and the Model 3 is from 2017. As for the Cybertruck, it took them over a decade to actually figure out how to build it, and even with all that lead time they still haven’t come close to their stated goals.

Hyundai and Kia, meanwhile, are offering higher quality, longer-range options for much less. It would be really interesting to see some competition from BYD (Build Your Dreams, the best-known EV make from China) or XPENG, but of course here in the erstwhile land of capitalism actual competition is, well, mostly not allowed.

Interesting that about a century ago, a guy whose company produced a car that changed the whole image of cars stuck stubbornly with his obsolete design long enough to open the market to competitors who actually did keep up with the times, offering superior engines, range, comfort, safety, and pricing. I’m talking about another industrial titan/repugnant human: Henry Ford. He kept the Model T in production from 1908 to 1927, when it was no longer competitive with…well, anything else.