Bob Lutz believes Elon Musk has “singlehandedly taken automotive leadership and put it back in the United States.” Lutz, now 90 years old, is a former automotive executive at BMW, Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. Never shy about expressing his opinions, Lutz (the father of many important vehicles such as the Dodge Viper and the Chevrolet Volt) once called Tesla a “losing enterprise” that is “going out of business.”
During a recent interview with Steven Cole Smith, Lutz admitted that he has tempered his criticism of Elon Musk. Today, Lutz believes that “Tesla is the benchmark for the world of automotive electrification.” At a time when luxury brands like Cadillac, Lexus and others have attempted to compete with Mercedes and BMW, Lutz acknowledges that Tesla has actually done it. He reminds that the Tesla Model S outsells three notable premium luxury competitive vehicles combined - the Audi A8, BMW 7-Series and Mercedes S-Class.
There is no electric vehicle automaker that does not have Tesla as the number one competitive target.
Many automotive traditionalists continue to ignore the exponential growth of Tesla sales, often only focusing on real and perceived shortcomings of Elon Musk and Tesla. Yet, the company will sell nearly 1.5 million vehicles globally this year. According to the California New Car Dealers Association, only Toyota has sold more cars of any kind in California than Tesla through the first half of 2022. Tesla only trails China’s BYD Company globally among plug-in vehicle sales this year (640,748 sold for BYD vs. 564,873 for Tesla). It’s interesting to note that Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway owns 7.7% of BYD
Elon Musk was interviewed recently during the Financial Times Future of the Car conference. What was most notable from the Musk interview had nothing to do with Twitter. Musk’s thoughts on the business of automotive were very enlightening. Musk stated that he would not have wanted to go through the pain of making an EV if legacy automakers had invested in electric vehicles. Musk reminded the audience that the history of car startup survival is very low. It should be clear to all, that Tesla has a long runway for survival even as competition heats up from legacy automakers as well as new carmakers, particularly those from China. There is no electric vehicle automaker that does not have Tesla as the number one competitive target. That fact alone makes Tesla significant irrespective of my belief that the company’s current stock price also makes Tesla overvalued.
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