Tesla again jumped in value when Hertz ordered 100,000 units, I don't see why since Tesla is not short of orders, it has supply issues, expanding the order book makes no difference to supply. Tesla valuation is completely detached from the company’s worth and it ignores the uphill battles Tesla needs to face from now on. One has to be crazy and blind to be oblivious to the fact that Tesla valuation is based on the unrealistic expectations of what Elon Musk is capable of. Sure, the guy has rockets going into space and plans to colonize Mars so his cult followers seem to believe he can run Tesla on magic and are willing to pay cartoon prices for the shares, but…..
Established automakers have been rather savvy… They let Tesla create the market and go through all the teething problems at their cost, Tesla almost went bankrupt doing all that while the others just sat back and watched. Now that Tesla has created the market and has shown others what type of EV the consumer wants, the established automakers will put themselves into gear and overtake Tesla many times over, these guys just weren’t interested in Evs until there was at least 1m cars a year market to enter. These automakers know how to build good looking cars cheaply and at a higher quality than Tesla, they also know how to market cars much better than Tesla, not to mention that they have existing dealer & service networks and spare part outlets that Tesla does not have. Musk made two big mistakes, the first was not to employ professional & experienced automakers as plant managers to run his plants, this might not seem to be a problem while there was no competition, but when serious competition ramps up, it will be a problem that will take years for Tesla to fix, perhaps too long for Tesla to remain in the mass market. The second was something that I’ve told Musk himself, going downmarket from the Model S was a policy error, if Tesla wants to remain in business at all, it needs to create a niche market for itself and give up the notion of trying to corner the mass market with cars that look like 1990 models i.e. go upstream from the model S with cars that look the part. What could help Tesla remain relevant in BEVs is if autonomous cars became legal but this is highly unlikely in Musk’s time, so Tesla is more likely to struggle than to keep growing. Musk’s future is in Space X, not in Tesla.
Further, BEVs in general won’t be the permanent replacement for ICE cars. BEVs are not the green machines people think they are… scaling uptake of BEVs to a billion or more will not resolve the pollution problem, it will just substitute one problem for several other more serious problems in mining, energy shortages and toxicity (battery manufacturing, battery charging that wastes 40% of the input energy and then disposing of a billion huge EV batteries is no joke). When the billion mark of BEVs is reached, the focus will have to shift away from BEVs to either fuel cells or back to the ICE running on pollution-free fuels such as hydrogen, Tesla is totally unprepared for this, the others are.