NBA superstar Charles Barkley made a now-legendary comment prior to the US Olympic basketball Dream Team playing Angola in 1992.
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We just drove the all-electric Chevy Bolt — and Tesla is officially in trouble (TSLA, GM)
Priced just under $30,000 with tax credits, with 200-plus miles of range on a single battery charge, the Bolt shows that GM has stepped off the sidelines.
OK, so it's not the coolest-looking car on the planet ...
Staggering cash burn
This is a type of competition Tesla has never faced before. For the first time, it will have to spend money to get people to buy its cars — and it can't spend anywhere near as much as the GM's of the world. (We should note, too, that Musk isn't scared about GM arriving on the scene because if anything he wants more EVs on the market, knowing that he can't accomplish his planet-saving goals by himself.)
As Tesla grows, it's being pulled away from what it does best, toward what it doesn't do as well. This is a natural process of maturing as an automaker. Tesla's biggest challenge, going forward, is to avoid being such a disruptive upstart in a 100-year-old business that it gets clobbered by the big, slow carmakers that just happen to be able to flip a switch and build hundreds of thousands of Tesla-like vehicles much faster than Tesla can build actual its cars.
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Clearly, Tesla would be in less trouble if the Chevy Bolt were a bad car. But it isn't. Teslas have always blown me away. The Bolt blew me away for different reasons. I just hope Tesla is prepared to take this into account.
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