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Tesla vs. The Competition

2023/8/9
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节目主持人:特斯拉曾占据电动汽车市场主导地位,但市场份额下降,竞争加剧。Cybertruck的发布和量产延迟对市场竞争格局造成影响。 Johnny Lieberman:Cybertruck的设计独特,引发市场关注,但量产交付延迟。 Andrew Hawkins:特斯拉的超级充电网络是其核心竞争优势,但其他厂商正在努力追赶。 Paul Snyder:特斯拉早期的设计创新,但目前设计已显老旧,竞争对手在设计方面取得进步。 Nilay Patel:特斯拉在汽车技术和用户体验方面领先,其软件更新机制是其一大优势,但竞争对手正在努力缩小差距。 Doug DeMuro:特斯拉在汽车加速性能方面曾领先,但竞争对手正在赶超,在其他性能方面特斯拉并非突出。 Jake Fisher:特斯拉的汽车可靠性表现一般,但竞争对手也在努力提升可靠性,部分车型可靠性表现尚可。 Scott Galloway:特斯拉的品牌影响力很大,但Elon Musk的负面形象对其品牌形象造成影响,竞争对手的品牌影响力也在增强。 节目主持人:特斯拉仍然是美国电动汽车市场的领导者,但竞争对手正在追赶,在一些方面已经超越特斯拉。特斯拉的成功在于其开创了电动汽车市场,并推动了行业发展,但未来仍面临挑战。

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Tesla's dominance in the EV market has seen a significant decline from 80% to 60%, with projections suggesting it could drop to 18% by 2026. The introduction of the Cybertruck and the competition's advancements are discussed.

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In 2019, Tesla was lapping the competition. It owned roughly 80% of the EV market. America was making a gradual shift toward electric cars. Tesla was on a roll, and then it announced its next big thing. Los Angeles, November 2019. The skies are polluted. The world is addicted to oil. But we're here to offer a solution. The Cybertruck.

The Cybertruck, a stainless steel pickup that looked like a cyberpunk military fever dream. Sharp angles everywhere. There's nothing even historically that really looks like the Cybertruck. And it was kind of like, OK, what if DeLorean made a pickup truck was maybe part of the inspiration. Johnny Lieberman is an automotive journalist. It's wacky. I mean, it's very cool looking to me.

you know, when I saw it and kind of knew what it was, I put a deposit down on one. And so did nearly 2 million others, all to reserve their spot in line, even if no one knew when the truck would actually be available.

It wasn't out yet, but it started popping up in videos with style icons like Pharrell and Travis Scott. People were buying and selling their spots in line. The Cybertruck waiting list was reaching hype beast levels of anticipation. I got caught up in the buzz and I just thought it was such a cool looking vehicle. Like, you know, polarizing, of course, but like, wow, I like things that don't look like anything else. Some people just absolutely hate it.

Love it or hate it, the Cybertruck was a complete design departure from the rest of Tesla's models. It represented a new and exciting direction for the company. Tesla had popular cars. The Model Y launched in 2020 and was a hit. But it looked just like every other Tesla since the Model S. The lineup was starting to feel a little stale. So people couldn't wait to get their hands on this truck. But now, nearly four years after the unveiling, they're still waiting to get their hands on this truck.

At the time of this recording, Tesla hasn't shipped any

In fact, the first one just rolled off the production line in July. So, one down, 999,999 more to go. And when the Cybertruck finally does arrive, it will enter an increasingly crowded EV truck market that didn't really exist four years ago. There are Hummers, Ford F-150s, Rams. There's even a buzzy California startup called Rivian that exclusively makes EV trucks and SUVs. I've never put a deposit down on a vehicle before.

Well, I did it for the Tesla. They never made it. So then I did it again for the Rivian and then I bought it. For Lieberman and other EV buyers, the excitement around the Cybertruck and Tesla has waned. It's no longer the only game in town. And now Tesla's 80% domination of the market has been whittled down to 60%. And some projections have it plummeting to 18% market share by 2026. The competition is here.

This is Land of the Giants. I'm Tamara Warren. And I'm Patrick George. Tesla is the company that made EVs cool. It sold a vision where the future was luxurious and sustainable. But now the rest of the industry is selling a similar vision. So today we're going to see how Tesla stacks up against the competition and how the competition stacks up against Tesla. To do so, we're going to play a little game.

Here's how it works. We've split the experience of owning a new EV into seven different categories, seven ways that customers commonly evaluate their EV purchases. Things like price, performance, quality, ease of charging, the vibe of the brand, and so on. For each of these categories, we spoke to experts as well as people who have recently purchased EVs. Some of them bought Teslas and some of them bought other brands. At the end of each category, we'll award a point to either Tesla or the competition, depending on who's doing better.

Simple. One point per category. Whoever has the most points at the end wins.

All right, Patrick, let's play, starting with one of the primary concerns new EV buyers shared with us. How am I going to charge this thing? There was like a nervousness of getting a vehicle that you're just not sure what the charging experience is actually like. If you're used to driving a gas car, the oil industry's got you covered. Gas stations are everywhere. But for EV owners, a little more planning is required.

The range is a priority factor and how far I can go without being inconvenienced. And range anxiety has long been a factor that held people back from buying electric cars. But as batteries have gotten better, range anxiety isn't as bad as it used to be. In fact, most EVs these days are getting around 200 to 300 miles to a charge.

That's a lot more than what the average American drives every day, around 40 miles. That was just a huge wake-up call and a game changer because it really kind of obliterated this sort of fundamental concern that most auto companies thought. What was the reason why there was no demand for electric cars?

Andrew Hawkins is transportation editor at The Verge and our authority on all things charging. Now I would say it's charging anxiety is the thing that most people will say is preventing them from making the switch. And honestly, figuring this part out can be a pain in the ass.

not successfully charged my car in public. - Charging this car currently for me is a total bitch. My parking garage does not allow me to charge. They won't even set it up for me. - It takes a while to charge your car. Like I've pulled into a parking lot that has these, that like says there's one available. Somebody pulls in right in front of me,

but they're gonna be there for half an hour to an hour. So it's not like a gas station where I could just wait. - It's a lot easier to fill up at a gas station for 10 minutes than to wait a couple of hours in the middle of a drive. - So I put in a home charger and that's kind of the only way that you can

have this car is like having a charger at home. - Figuring out how to charge your EV depends on a few factors. If you own your own home and have a parking spot, you could install your own charging station. It's a bit pricey though, like a couple grand. Obviously a lot of people rent or don't have a dedicated parking spot.

So that means filling up at a public charging station run by a company like Electrify America. It's kind of like a gas station, but there are far fewer. BMW offers free charging with Electrify America, which is nowhere in Manhattan or Brooklyn. So you have to drive to a Queens Mall and walk around for like 30 minutes. That does not sound convenient. But if you own a Tesla, it's different.

I've had no issues. They're everywhere. Every five, ten minutes, there's a Tesla charger, it feels like. They do have an incredible charging network. Tesla's supercharger network is the largest in America. It's generally regarded as the easiest and is often the fastest to use. But it only works for Teslas.

It's a huge advantage for the company. The Verge is Andrew Hawkins again. It's been something that customers have cited over the years as being one of the primary reasons why they've decided to buy a Tesla. For years, Tesla was the only car company that spent real money, billions of dollars in this case, to build out a charging infrastructure. It was mainly an afterthought for the entire industry. And I think...

Elon Musk and Tesla made the very smart realization that if they wanted people to be driving electric vehicles in all the states and then maybe all the countries in the world, they were going to have to make an equal, if not greater investment in charging infrastructure. So they decided to do it themselves. So great if you own a Tesla. Less great if you don't. But help is on the way.

Plugging in is about to become faster and easier for thousands of American drivers. GM joining Ford in a landmark agreement to allow their vehicles to use all Tesla chargers. Andrew Hawkins says this move is great for Tesla. Tesla gets a...

But if other car companies have access to Tesla's superior charging network, Tesla's advantage in this category kind of evaporates, right?

As far as the customer experience, yeah, but we're not quite there yet. These changes will be rolling out over the next year or two. It's also a great additional revenue stream for Tesla, the company. Now, the other major EV makers will be relying on Tesla for a key part of its business. So we're going to give this point to Tesla. It's still way ahead of the competition when it comes to charging. Next up, let's talk about design. Take it away, Tamara.

Car design is a complex execution of engineering and creativity. It's form and function. Form speaks to our aesthetic tastes. It's what makes a car attractive or unattractive. Function is how the driver interacts with the car, that intuitive understanding of how to operate it. When the vision of the company and the vision of the designers meet in the same place, that these things actually hit the road.

It's a very awesome time to be a car designer, I think. Paul Snyder is our design expert today. He's the chairperson of transportation design at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, one of the top car design programs in the world. He says when Tesla introduced the Model S over a decade ago, it accomplished a fresh perspective on minimalist design. When Tesla first came out, it was pretty astounding, I think, in the industry. The interior is especially fresh, and that mainly has to do with its simplicity.

And the care that was taken in the few details. Model S really cracked it open in that regard because it did have a very fresh proportion because there is no engine in the front and it's done really well. But the Model S was a long time ago and Tesla hasn't played with proportion much since then. And some of the EV buyers we spoke to are over it.

You can see that they are running the same cars that they've been running for a while. I don't think they've like modernized the look, but then you see the truck and you're like, oh damn, if that's their vision of the future, I choose something else.

Tesla's used to look cool and now they don't. They've become the Uber car of the city. Before we had this car, we were leasing a RAV4. We would always be like, oh my God, someone's going to accidentally get into our car because it's the Uber car. And now that's Tesla. When our design expert Paul Snyder looks around, he really likes what some of Tesla's competitors are doing right now.

I think freshest things on the road, I saw one just the other day, is the Lucid Air. Driving down the road, the thing looks like a spaceship, but it still looks like a car. It's just really something. Other car companies are now taking EV design seriously. The Germans have finally shown up. Luxury brands like BMW have long set the standard for beauty in automotive design. But that company's early EV entry, the i3, looked more like a toy car than a luxury ride.

BMW's new i7 hits a very different mark. It's stately and telegraphs wealth and exclusivity. At a much more affordable price point, Tesla's competition is coming from a somewhat surprising place. It's Hyundai, a brand associated with a Kano car design. It's like the car you buy when you get your first real job. But the company has positioned itself as a leader in EV design. The Hyundai Ioniq 6 is a sculpted sedan with a luxe look that's won multiple design awards.

As for what Tesla has cooking, there have been rumors about a new Roadster and a small Econo car, but as of this summer, we haven't seen them yet. So they're good, but I wouldn't say I would give them an award. I'll reconsider Tesla when they redo the Model S. I mean, how long are they going to keep selling that Model S? For the design category, we're awarding this point to the competition, at least until Tesla shows us something new. That puts the score at a dead even one to one.

But car design overlaps with a key area of innovation that Tesla has pioneered, and that's the user experience of driving and controlling the car through tech. So our next category we're calling tech features.

The user experience of the car was really important to me. I'm tech background. I cared about that kind of stuff. I wanted to be on the forefront of what was happening. Tesla's biggest impact on the industry, next to popularizing EVs, may have been reimagining the driving experience through technology. Everything from the experience, just unlocking it, getting on the road,

It feels like driving an iPad because Tesla basically put a big-ass iPad, a tablet-like touchscreen, in all of its cars. Instead of a thousand tiny knobs and buttons, Tesla put nearly all its controls on that one touchscreen. Because we're a smartphone-obsessed society, that experience ends up feeling pretty natural to a lot of buyers.

The screen controls just about everything. Basic stuff like navigation and music, but also surprising stuff. Air conditioning, the windshield wipers, locking and unlocking the car. You can even access Netflix or play video games on the screen. Tesla had a few reasons for doing all this. Sure, it's a cool user experience, but getting rid of all those buttons and knobs also saved it a ton of money. Another way Tesla does tech differently, it's constantly tweaking the way its cars work through over-the-air updates.

So I love that they have over-the-air updates that just you get in in the morning and you can see what's been updated over time. Like iPhones, Tesla's connect to Wi-Fi so that when the company pushes out software updates, the cars get upgraded with bug fixes and new features, just like when you wake up to a new version of iOS. And there's a reason all this is possible. Tesla's big innovation was re-architecting how all the computers in a car work together. Nilay Patel is editor-in-chief at The Verge.

If you think about your average mass market car, a Ford or a Chevy, what those companies fundamentally do is they assemble components from lots and lots of different suppliers. So the computer that runs the windshield wipers is totally different than the computer that runs the radio, is totally different than the computer that runs the brake lights or the cruise control.

Tesla integrated all those computers. They designed their car from the ground up as a single computing environment. And they're able to ship software to that computer over the air very fast. A company like Ford or Chevy or Volvo or whoever is at the mercy of suppliers who actually write all the code for those modules in the car. And they have no unified way of updating their car's software because it's actually lots of different computers.

Tesla's approach has been revolutionary, and Patel says the industry is now racing to catch up. Every carmaker has decided that Tesla's way is the right way to do it, and they are all moving towards integrating those computers as fast as they can. But surprise, surprise, the traditional automakers aren't great at tech and software, so they've outsourced parts of that experience to big tech companies. Does your car have Apple CarPlay? Do you like it better than your native system? What's that? Yes? That's just one example of many.

Ultimately, this means, just as before, traditional carmakers still don't have as much control over the car as Tesla or the seamless integration. Without question, Tesla is in front in terms of what automaker at scale has the most control of the software in its cars. Tesla is miles ahead of everyone else. I think that that gap will close pretty rapidly. This is an existential problem for these companies. Tesla is going to be in front for a while to come.

No surprise here, we're giving this point to Tesla. Alright, that's two points for Tesla and one for the competition. When we come back, we've got four more categories to settle who wins this battle for EV supremacy.

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Okay, this is a fun one. Let's talk performance. So for years, Tesla had the fastest car on the market. Ha! That is the Lucid Air Sapphire, and it's the triple motor nightmare for Elon Musk.

The one question that everyone wants answered is, will it finally unseat that Tesla Model S Plaid as the quickest accelerating production car of all time? Last year, Jason Kamisa hosted a definitive drag race on YouTube for Hagerty Insurance between the three fastest production cars on the planet. A Tesla, a Lucid, and a Bugatti.

Oh, we're going to have a winner. The biggest advantage that Tesla's had in terms of performance is on acceleration, right? So zero to 60 is the common measurement of a car's acceleration capabilities. And that's where electric cars shine so well. Doug DeMuro is our performance expert. He reviews cars on YouTube and started a car auction website called Cars and Bids. I think that most people...

When they think of performance, they think of a car that goes fast. I think automakers in the past were hesitant to put so much performance in relatively modestly priced cars because they were afraid that people then wouldn't buy the expensive cars. And Tesla was like, forget that.

Tesla started putting that speedy 0-60 acceleration in all of its cars, not just the high-end models, and that kicked off a trend. And so suddenly these other automakers were like, oh crap, we can't hide our good performance behind these high price tags. We have to make them more affordable because Tesla's already done that. Now, because of Tesla, nearly all EVs are speedy, which is great for us drivers. But unless you're living like Dominic Toretto in The Fast and the Furious, speed isn't everything. I live my life a quarter mile at a time.

For car enthusiasts, they also would consider performance to be things like the steering feel and the way that a car handles. Like, how does it handle through a corner? How well does it stay planted in a corner? How stable does it feel in a hard corner at high speed? And in that sense, actually, Tesla is not a particular standout and never really has been. When DiMiro surveys the competition, he thinks that Ford, Hyundai, and Kia are giving Tesla a run for its money. They're all making EVs that have nailed overall great performance.

But I think Tesla correctly identified that most people don't really care about that. They never really have. They just want to slam on the accelerator pedal and show their friends how fast it goes down the on-ramp. And so from a performance perspective, looking at it from the world of the car enthusiast, Teslas are fast, but not much more than that.

Okay, back to Tesla's speed advantage. Remember that drag race between the Tesla Bugatti and the Lucid? This is going to be a production car world record. The last time we raced a Lucid versus a Tesla, the Lucid was eight car lengths behind. Now it's three in front. That's right. The Lucid won and Tesla lost. By a lot. Meaning it's no longer the fastest EV.

So while Tesla has moved the industry to make faster cars widely available, it appears the competition has caught up. Literally. And in other areas of performance, Tesla was already behind. So we're awarding this point to the competition. Which brings us to a dead heat at two apiece. Alright, now for the slightly less fun but super important part of owning a car. Patrick, let's talk about quality.

Okay, so when it comes to quality, buyers we talked to had some strong opinions about Teslas. This just doesn't feel luxury to me. If I'm going to spend $70,000, the drive needs to feel nicer. And if it's a luxury brand, then I as an owner expect better. They're dumpy cars. Like, I don't know, you go inside of a Tesla and they're like, the handles are crap.

It feels plastic and junk in a way that I ended up with a BMW and it's like, oh, this is an actual luxury car. Tesla is kind of considered a luxury vehicle just because of the price point.

But if you actually get inside a BMW of that price range or Mercedes-Benz, it's a whole other level. The interior materials of Tesla really aren't that different from, you know, a Hyundai or a Toyota. That last voice was Jake Fisher. He's the senior director of auto testing at Consumer Reports. His publication surveys thousands of car owners closely on how much they like their cars.

He says the thing about measuring quality, though, is that it can be pretty subjective. Do the cup holders fit my beverage? What about the quality of the interior fabrics? Is the ride nice? Fisher says there's a more useful way to look at all this. Instead of quality, which is vague, he directed us to a more specific metric.

We're talking about reliability. We're talking about things that have gone wrong. So things that broke, things that require you to take the car to the dealership to get resolved. Essentially, how does the car hold up over time? Reliability problems or those problems are not created equal. For instance, you might be in your car and it doesn't start and you can't go anywhere. Well, that's a severe problem. You could also have a problem where a piece of trim has broken off and has landed in your lap.

Well, that's a less severe problem. It doesn't stop you from driving your vehicle. However, you do have to get it fixed and you are not very happy and you may wind up having to have someone do service on the vehicle. So we actually weight all those when we're talking about true reliability and we predict the reliability of the new vehicles based on the history. And when he looks at Tesla and weighs in all those factors, he says Tesla's reliability record isn't stellar, but it could be worse.

We don't see a lot of powertrain problems. We don't see a lot of major mechanical problems, but we see a lot of the types of issues that I would say that most of the industry has resolved 50 years ago. Like an issue where the hatch does not close or the door doesn't close or the paint isn't, you know, is scraping off because of really poor fitment.

Problems like this would kill the reputation of a car from a traditional company. But Fisher says Tesla owners often react a bit more like gadget buyers than car buyers, that early adopters typically expect their product to be a little buggy. The same people who have the problems are telling us they're happy.

So is it possible that the manufacturer, that Tesla is saying, wow, if we want to make our customers happy, maybe I should worry less about making that door close and more about giving them the latest feature. They didn't choose to buy a boring Toyota, for instance, you know, that's going to be reliable and run for 300,000 miles or whatever. Their priority is getting the latest and greatest. And they probably understand that there's going to be growing pains with that latest technology. But what about other EVs?

What's interesting is what we find in our data is that the manufacturers that have been building internal combustion engine vehicles for 100 years are struggling more than Tesla when it comes to electric vehicle stuff. We're talking power converters and batteries and charging and motors and all those. They're struggling more. And the reason is that Tesla actually has been doing it for a lot longer than they have.

But now, Fisher says some of Tesla's competitors are figuring it out. The Korean triplets, I would call them. The Kia EV6, the Hyundai IONIQ 5, and the Hyundai IONIQ 6. The Genesis GV60. These are vehicles that really are, they feel really well built. The reliability that we've seen is top notch. They're very solid vehicles. You look at BMW, for instance, with the i4 and the iX. I mean, these are just exceptionally solid vehicles.

So some good cars from the competition. But it's not all bad news for Tesla. Fisher says the older, less popular cars like the Model X have more issues. But the newer, simpler, more popular cars like the Model 3, they actually do all right. The Tesla Model 3 has been consistently average. I'm not saying that it's bad. I'm not saying it's the best car in the world. But we do recommend the Tesla Model 3. In fact, it is overall, while they may have a fair amount of problems, they aren't major problems. So it is a bit of a push.

Okay, we gotta go with our expert on this one. If he says it's a push, I guess we have to award this point to no one. Meaning we're still all tied up. So let's talk about everyone's least favorite part of owning a car: the buying it part.

Okay, so say you want to buy a new car. Cars are a huge important purchase, typically the biggest or second biggest a person might make next to a house. And for most shoppers, buying a new car means going inside a dealership, test driving a couple, haggling over price, and eventually signing on the dotted line. A lot of people hate this experience.

The dealership model is extremely unattractive. There is nothing attractive about the dealership model. You're trying to get out of there and they bring their sales manager in to try and do another negotiation. It's always a very disappointing experience. They were trying to hard sell me. They're trying to negotiate me and trying to make a lot of money on me at the dealerships. It was like a horrible experience.

Meanwhile, Tesla offers a very different experience. With Tesla, it just felt completely the opposite. Tesla's approach is very elegant and simplifies things. If you want to buy a Tesla, you can just order one online. Or you can visit a physical Tesla store and order one there. The options are intentionally limited. Just a few colors, just a few models, no special Eddie Bauer additions here. And there's no haggling. The price is the price. Simple, right?

Except Tesla recently complicated things by upending its own way of doing business. It started cutting prices. By a lot. We never really saw such a drastic reduction in their prices on their model lineup in the company's history before. So that was a pretty clear indication that they were worried about the competition.

Here's The Verge's Andrew Hawkins again. They were seeing all of these other EVs coming on the market, and they were concerned that they weren't going to be the first choice for most of these customers. That if a customer was out shopping for an EV, that maybe they'd buy a Ford before they'd buy a Tesla because Ford was a trusted brand, a recognizable logo, and didn't maybe have as much baggage attached to it as Tesla seems to have. So I think those price reductions were a pretty big red flag in terms of

the thought processes that are going on at Tesla HQ. And these price fluctuations can be frustrating. You know, annoys certain existing customers because if you paid $60,000 for a Model Y yesterday and today it's $52,000 and they're not giving you a rebate, boy, that sucks. And then it's also confusing for customers, I think, you know, and like, well, I'm going to buy it, but maybe if I wait a week, it'll go down in price.

Or, as noted scholar Fat Joe would say, "Yesterday's price is not today's price." No one likes price volatility. That's part of the whole reason people hate going to a dealership to buy a car. We're still going to give a slight edge to Tesla in this category. Sure, the price changes are annoying, but the experience of buying the car is still generally easier. So, point to Tesla. Which means Tesla has regained the lead 3-2 going into our seventh and final category: Brand.

Okay, let's talk brands, because what we buy often comes down to how we perceive a brand. Can you really tell the difference in Coke versus Pepsi? Scott Galloway is our brand expert. He's a professor of marketing at NYU School of Business and co-host of Vox Media's tech podcast, Pivot. I do a test taste with my students. They love Grey Goose Vodka. 90% of them can't tell the difference between that and Smirnoff, which is a

a vodka at a fraction of the price. Galloway says when it comes to brand identity, Tesla has always excelled. It's an unbelievable brand, huge depth of associations, personification through Elon Musk, his mastery of new mediums to get attention without paying for traditional branding.

He's put on a masterclass on how to build a global brand of that depth in less than a decade. He says that when you choose a brand, it says something about you, especially when you buy a Tesla. It not only says that you like innovative products and you care about the environment and you're wealthy, which are all wonderful things.

It also says that you're an Elon fan. And that last part is starting to become an issue for Tesla. There's a lot of people who are no longer Elon fans. The image that I had of it was sort of like, kind of like a tech jerk. They're still the like libertarian D-bag Tesla drivers. Anti-trans, misogynistic. I'm Jewish and I chose a BMW.

A German car over a Tesla for like partially because of moral reasons. A lot of people are sick of Elon Musk. That's not news. But it is a reality for this brand and our association with it. And all of this is happening at a time when the competition is gaining, and in some cases surpassing Tesla in key categories. And a lot of those companies are legacy brands that buyers have a long history with.

Some of the best brands in the world are in this sector. I think Hyundai surprisingly has been one of the more innovative automobile companies. I don't think anyone was expecting it. But companies like BMW and Mercedes, they have such a depth of brand equity.

And they kind of go after, I think, the similar luxury buyer. I think those brands just continue to resonate with people. As more people switch to EVs and more EV options become available, customers will have to increasingly ask themselves, which brand is right for me? But here's the thing.

For now, despite all the baggage, Galloway says you just can't count Tesla or Elon Musk out. Everyone's coming for his launch, and you know what? He keeps figuring out a way to outrun them. Just look at the Model Y. It's the best-selling car in the world so far this year. As it relates to EVs, they're the original gangster. Like it or not, the point goes to Tesla, which means Tesla wins 4-2.

It was close, but as our expert pointed out, Tesla is the OG. It's the Kleenex of EVs, the Coca-Cola, the brand that defined the category. That's powerful stuff. Tesla created a market for EVs, and over the last 20 years has pushed the rest of the industry to follow in its own image. The industry has followed. Now, in a lot of ways, it's actually ahead of Tesla, in categories like performance and design, for instance.

But it's not quite enough to win. Tesla is still very much the king of EVs in America, with a bigger slice of the market than all other EV makers combined. For now, anyway. Next time on Land of the Giants. After Elon Musk bought Twitter, you probably saw a lot of the headlines about how intense it was to work under him. But Musk's hardcore management style was old news for a lot of folks who have worked for Tesla.

And if you didn't want to work six days a week, if you didn't want to work extra hours, if you didn't want that, what happened to you? You didn't want. Won't. No. You going to work six days or you going to find you another job. This is how this company was. That's next time on the Tesla Shockwave. Musk wants to change the world, but at what cost?

Land of the Giants, the Tesla shockwave is produced by the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with our colleagues at The Verge. Our producer is Charlotte Silver. Zach Mack is our showrunner and senior producer. Jolie Myers is our editor.

Claire Cronin is our fact checker. Adrienne Lilly mixed and scored this episode. Andrew Hawkins is transportation editor at The Verge. Nishat Kurwa is our executive producer. My co-host is Tamara Warren. And I'm Patrick George. Follow us to hear our next episode when it drops.