To my knowledge, Tesla Motors were one of the first electric vehicle sellers for the ‘general’ public.
For context, the Model S debuted in 2012, and to this day, it still seems to be a very popular car.
How come other car manufactures cannot (or have taken many years) to come close to the performance and popularity of the Tesla models? Is it that hard to create 500km+ ranged electric vehicles? Tesla did it 10+ years ago, why has the rest not?
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The classic big car manufacturers were hesitant to move into EVs because it wasn’t clear at the time that there would be a market for them, and they were doing just fine selling ICE (internal combustion engine) cars. There was also a big initial cost that had to be overcome in terms of getting the necessary infrastructure in place. Who wants to buy a car that you can’t take anywhere because there are no charging stations? And even if there are *some* charging stations, what if you need to travel out of state and they don’t have them there?
One very good move that Tesla made to overcome this issue was to start with high-end luxury sports cars. The people who bought these vehicles did so to show them off and take them on short drives. They were wealthy enough to afford another car (or several) as their main vehicle anyway, so the range of their Tesla made no difference to their mobility. Also, it didn’t matter if there were only charging stations in some areas, because Tesla was only looking to sell a small volume of cars with big profit margins in those early years. They didn’t need to sell big volumes to make enough money.
This move had another advantage: it branded Tesla’s EVs as cool and desirable. If they had started with a sensible, reasonably priced mid-sized car, which might have seemed like the obvious move to attract lots of customers, then the first impression that the general public would have had of Tesla and its EVs would have been decidedly “meh”, and it would have been hard to sell people on EVs over ICE cars that way. By making EVs (and specifically *their* EVs) sexy first, they were then able later to use that image to sell cars in the lower segments (first the model S and model X which were still luxury vehicles and thus maintained the brand image, and then later the model 3).
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