We've heard variants on the parent-comments line of thinking ever since the Model S came out in 2012. Yet, fast forward to 2019, and the gap between Tesla and traditional automakers has only widened (to name a few axes: EV sales, EV margins, rate of software improvements/OTA updates, Supercharger network, battery production).
This is what should terrify big automakers: it's not that Tesla's gap is per se insurmountable; it's that the pace at which Tesla is improving and innovating is far greater than the pace at which any other automaker is doing it.
Most comparative analyses between Tesla and other auto companies suffer from a fallacy that relates to this: they compare the Tesla of today to the ___ of tomorrow. Perhaps some day a traditional auto manufacturer will offer an all-electric, self-driving car. But how long is it going to take them to get there? Not to announce something, or to design a concept car, but to actually build them and sell them at scale and with positive margins? And what will Tesla offer by the time they do?
My wager is that by the time Toyota offers a compelling all-electric car (by today's standards), the feature gap between a $x Tesla and a $x Toyota will be so great that the Toyota will no longer be compelling to the market.
Throw in lower margins as companies build their first EVs, the baggage of dealerships, a likely recession some time in the next decade, and it's not at all clear to me how traditional manufacturers like Toyota will survive the transition.
