Sandy Munro, a non-Tesla automotive guy who likes Tesla and its tech pretty well rates BYD as likely to be the biggest automaker in the world in 10 years, and rather explicitly thought it would beat out Tesla on that time scale.


Interesting that you mention time scale. I think Musk is probably right about most of these things, including the fact that hybrids will only be a transitional phase. The question is, though, how long will that transition last? If it's a few years, then it's a waste of time and energy to get involved in hybrids - go straight to the ultimate solution, perfect it, make it as cheap as possible, and you will win - the Tesla strategy. But if it's a 20-year transition, that doesn't work as well.

Musk is notoriously too optimistic about how fast his vision of the world will work out, and I think this is perhaps another example of that, where the time scale of the transition ends up giving hybrids a much bigger role than he thought. Tesla has clearly staked its claim on a fast roll-out of an all-electric future, whereas BYD can do well with fast or slow.

dtb