Hi,friends, any idea if Jaguar i-pace would be a real threat to tesla financially? I read some posts for the car itself, and impression is that m3 is way better (but you know, forum bias maybe). Any idea about the influence to stock price? Thanks!
Others have addressed the volume difference, but imagine asking if Ford GT sales are going to be a threat to Chevy Camaro sales. Both are sports cars right? Even if every Camaro owner wanted a GT, they couldn't have one because there simply aren't enough made.
To be a financial threat, a competitor needs to be able to build at least as many cars a year, and then they have to be more compelling. The Model 3 is far more of a threat to Model S and X sales than any competitor. The only non-Tesla EV built in numbers comparable to the Model S is the Nissan Leaf. The only thing those two cars have in common is the electric drive train. The new Leaf is a little bigger than the last generation, but it's still the size of a Ford Focus or Subaru Impreza.
The iPace and Taycan are toes in the water by European car makers. More will be coming in the 2020s, but by the time any European auto maker can produce enough cars to be any kind of threat to 2018 Tesla, they will be competing with a company with a sales volume more on par with 2018 Subaru or more.
The only scenarios where Tesla goes out of business at this point are: severe worldwide economic crisis or a major screw up on a car design that gets them a permanently bad reputation. If there are a slew of Model 3 fires that are traced back to a Tesla design flaw, it could be fatal.
At this point no competitor is going to be strong enough to hurt them very badly barring one of the two problems above. In the car business, no company really forces any other company out of business. The logistics of the industry prevent it. Making cars is heavy industry and those things don't change quickly. It takes a lot of effort to put anything new into production and the competition knows exactly what you're doing years before production hits stride.
In the 1980s Chrysler came out with the "must have" vehicle of the decade: the mini-van. They sold a lot of them in the first decade and the rest of the industry scrambled to catch up, but they all did and that type of car has faded from significance. Chrysler had some of its best years and they narrowed the gap between them and Ford and GM, but they still remained #3. There are a few factors behind that: Chrysler could only make so many cars a year, a large number of people were locked into their brand of car, and what people want in a car varies a lot. Chrysler got the "soccer mom" to switch from a sedan or station wagon, but everyone else kept driving what they were driving.
Tesla has proven to be probably the most dynamic car company in 100 years or more. They can switch direction better than most, but it still takes years to get something into production because cars are complex machines.
Apple was able to push Blackberry and Motorola out of the list of major players in the cell phone market in a few years because the dynamics of the electronics industry is very different. It isn't difficult to make millions of cell phones in a year. They are much simpler machines mechanically, take a lot less effort to build, and sell for significantly less money. Apple found they had high demand for the iPhone (and Google quickly got a following with the OS they slapped together Android) and iOS and Android quickly took over the market because they could build enough to saturate it in a few years.
The car industry has a lot more large players. The biggest companies sell about 10 million passenger vehicles a year. There are three in that range every year and a lot more over 1 million. The world market for cars and light trucks is around 100 million a year. That means nobody has more than about a 10% share of the market. It's a lot more balkanized than the phone market. People have different needs for their vehicles, so there is a larger variety of types available. And the number of sales a year is a tiny slice of the actual fleet on the roads of the world. There are over 1 billion vehicles on the road in the world. That's 10 years production and it isn't feasible to increase production to a point where the replacement rate could be much higher like it is with something like a cell phone.
We may see some car companies go out of business as the car industry shifts. Fiat-Chrysler is not very healthy. Renault-Nissan has done OK with some vehicles, but they aren't as strong a player as they once were. Car companies tend to fade from eroding car sales than from anything catastrophic. Chrysler and GM went bankrupt in 2009 because they were already weakened from years of poor sales that just barely paid the bills. Ford made it through because they were in a fundamentally better place, though it was touch and go for them too.
So roll your eyes when you see a headline claiming the next "Tesla-killer" is here because whatever that particular cars does in the market place, one thing that is guaranteed from a logistics stand point, it won't kill Tesla.
