Comment by BaseballPhysics

> I'm far from a Tesla fan myself, but one thing I found really cool are claims by friends who worked with Tesla is that they have a huge lead on mainstream car makers thanks to the fact they design and make a huge part of the cars and "stack" in-house.

That might be true, but it's not clear at all that it's good.

Vertical integration carries risks because you now have to run your own end-to-end supply chain, which means you are also responsible for building diversification in that supply chain (as otherwise you end up with single points of failure), which is complex and expensive.

I've heard similar claims about how cool it is that Tesla doesn't have dealerships, but the downside is they also have absolutely horrendous service.

And this is ignoring the fact that how Tesla builds and sells their products is somewhat orthogonal to the question of product category disruption.

No one would've called Apple disruptive if they made yet-another-flip-phone but just built and sold it differently.