Regarding the First-mover advantage, the Electric Viking omits the many known disadvantages of being the first to establish a presence in a new market.
First, first movers have to pioneer the market, and spend a lot of time bringing investors and supply chains and customers and news coverage up to speed on the concept. Home and public charging infrastructure starts at 0. There are orders of magnitude more engineers trained in EV/battery issues now than in 2008, and suppliers and recyclers are gearing up to support the industry as a whole, with no special bargains for Tesla.
Second, whether software, hardware or smart appliances, the first mover* has to establish custom interfaces, which means they can’t learn from any predecessor’s mistakes and have the oldest legacy systems. Later companies can start fresh with clean, mature standards.
Third is the competition with monied monoliths, which regularly crush (or buy) successful tech pioneers by leveraging their own experience and resources. As of 2021, Tesla was the 20th biggest car company in the world. VW, Daimler (Mercedes+), Ford, GM, BMW, etc.,
are making moves into the BEV market, and car shoppers will buy what suits them.
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*We’ll call Tesla a “first mover” for the purposes of dedicated production of EVs, even though other EVs predate Teslas.
A note about the cost of adding chargers to Ford dealerships: These costs are for disruptive retrofits. Putting chargers into new sites will almost certainly be cheaper. Also, charger installation has to be much easier in terms of prepping and permits than the large fuel tanks (one for each flavor) that gas stations (or dealerships or rental companies with their own tanks) need.
With chargers, there’s no longer the hassle of scheduling tanker trucks to refill your fuel tanks.
There is big profit in storing then returning energy to the market, now. As batteries become more common the margin will shrink. Like the Australian vanadium company that predicted vanadium would stay the same price while they added 50% to world production capacity (neither happened). Tesla’s South Australian Battery has had a huge impact on peak energy prices in the wholesale market.
Regarding the First-mover advantage, the Electric Viking omits the many known disadvantages of being the first to establish a presence in a new market.
First, first movers have to pioneer the market, and spend a lot of time bringing investors and supply chains and customers and news coverage up to speed on the concept. Home and public charging infrastructure starts at 0. There are orders of magnitude more engineers trained in EV/battery issues now than in 2008, and suppliers and recyclers are gearing up to support the industry as a whole, with no special bargains for Tesla.
Second, whether software, hardware or smart appliances, the first mover* has to establish custom interfaces, which means they can’t learn from any predecessor’s mistakes and have the oldest legacy systems. Later companies can start fresh with clean, mature standards.
Third is the competition with monied monoliths, which regularly crush (or buy) successful tech pioneers by leveraging their own experience and resources. As of 2021, Tesla was the 20th biggest car company in the world. VW, Daimler (Mercedes+), Ford, GM, BMW, etc.,
are making moves into the BEV market, and car shoppers will buy what suits them.
_____
*We’ll call Tesla a “first mover” for the purposes of dedicated production of EVs, even though other EVs predate Teslas.
A note about the cost of adding chargers to Ford dealerships: These costs are for disruptive retrofits. Putting chargers into new sites will almost certainly be cheaper. Also, charger installation has to be much easier in terms of prepping and permits than the large fuel tanks (one for each flavor) that gas stations (or dealerships or rental companies with their own tanks) need.
With chargers, there’s no longer the hassle of scheduling tanker trucks to refill your fuel tanks.
There is big profit in storing then returning energy to the market, now. As batteries become more common the margin will shrink. Like the Australian vanadium company that predicted vanadium would stay the same price while they added 50% to world production capacity (neither happened). Tesla’s South Australian Battery has had a huge impact on peak energy prices in the wholesale market.