The thing people don't understand about electric cars is they're orders of magnitude simpler than internal combustion cars. Not only that, but outside of the batteries, every single part of them is ancient tech that hasn't much changed in the past 100 years.

We didn't do electric cars for most of our automotive history because batteries have historically sucked. Since the invention of cell phones, however, there has been substantial market pressures to develop high-performance electrical storage. That's really the change - once you have the batteries, you have the kingdom.

There's ZERO reason Tesla should have a monopoly on coachwork, on controllers, on charging tech, on suspension, on motors, on seating, on anything because that shit has been handled so long it hurts. The only thing Tesla added to the equation was a commitment to building $100k electric cars, which is something that nobody had ever done before, which is the kind of loss-leader first-in innovation necessary to jump-start a new market segment. The first VCRs cost $10k (back in the '70s!) but the last VCRs were $39. Raw materials cost will never push an electric car down into the supercheep range, but there's literally nothing keeping electric cars expensive other than economies of scale.

Every manufacturer in the world is going to whip Tesla's ass when it comes to economies of scale.

Guaranteed: Tesla is going to stop making cars the minute they can make more money selling parts. I don't think Elon Musk gives a rat's ass about competing with the automotive industry, I think he wanted to nudge the world into sucking down volts instead of oil.