5 March

This is the $3.6 billion Tesla gigafactory in Nevada. This is a post about why I post about electric cars. It’s not just because I like them (though I do, I think people will wonder in a few years why we ever drove anything else). Tesla is not only the fastest growing car company in the world, it’s the fastest growing company of all time. The why is what this post is about. This factory makes batteries, and trucks. Largely as a result of this factory, Tesla is going to be able to make batteries that cost about 30% of what its competitors spend. It may destroy all of their competition, the battery is easily the most expensive part of an EV. Some analysts think even the largest car companies in the world like Toyota may collapse and cease to exist. EV growth hit a tipping point and fully electric vehicles made up 33% of all new car sales in Germany and the UK last year, up from less than 10% in both markets just 2 years earlier. Many industry analysts project countries being full EV by 2031. That’s less than a decade away. Every other major car manufacturer is scrambling to try to go electric. But they’ve left it very late, and Tesla is laps ahead of them. The reason Tesla is making astronomical amounts of money is really simple. They looked at the world a few years ago and said ‘hey, everything will go electric’. It was a no-brainer. And they built the technology to match that. The other car companies thought they could hang on with petrol and diesel. It may destroy them, they’re so far behind now. It takes huge investment and work to re-tool the car industry. I’ll post the specific economics of this argument in other posts. 20-30 years of denying climate change is likely going to destroy some of our biggest companies, and with them a big chunk of their national economies. A slaughter they could easily have avoided, except for lazy, dumb thinking.