Certainly the legacy car companies are familiar with production at scale. EV's might be new to them but large scale production is not. I really don't see this as a concern at all. I also don't see why GM won't be able to convert to EV. Build a factory(which they are doing) and then build the cars. They have the money to do it, they now have the will to do it(which they didn't prior), I'm not seeing the issue.
The concerns imo would be:
1)The lead they are giving up, where TSLA is the "name" in the field. Now do the legacy names carry over because of intrenched brand loyalty? I imagine they do. The quick filling of reservation slots for the Hummer back up that thinking.
2)The bigger one is the tech, and more specifically the batteries. I do hear quite often that TSLA's batteries are best in class with a sizable lead, though I am hearing more often about GM's Ultium battery.
Now, I really don't care if GM is the biggest EV car company in the world 15 years from now. Or who will be making the best battery 15 years from now. My thought on owning GM over TSLA right now is GM is looking pretty cheap, and should be getting a market boost due to converting to EV, while TSLA looks very expensive relatively speaking and already has all sorts of future growth built in. .
With all due respect, I still think you're underestimating manufacturing. OEMs had 100 years to figure it out. This is new technology. Not the same. Maybe a few words from a genius of engineering and physics will make you pause for thought:
"The difficulty and value of manufacturing is underappreciated," he told journalists, Wall Street analysts, and eager Tesla fans who had packed the company's design studio in Hawthorne, California.
"It's relatively easy to make a prototype but extremely difficult to mass manufacture a vehicle reliably at scale. Even for rocket science, it's probably a factor of 10 harder to design a manufacturing system for a rocket than to design the rocket. For cars it's maybe 100 times harder to design the manufacturing system than the car itself."
In 2018, Tesla went through what Musk called "production hell" as the company raced to build enough Model 3 sedans to claw its way out of debt. Over several months, that manufacturing struggle involved a massive tent built outside the company's factory to house an extra production line as well as grueling hours worked by Musk and the whole team, he said.
To Tesla's credit, it did post profits in both the third and fourth quarters of 2018 as the company moved into "delivery hell" — a new struggle to get new cars into owners' driveways.
"The issue is not about coming up with a car design — it's absolutely about the production system," Musk said. "You want to have a good product to build, but that's basically the easy part. The factory is the hard part."
If your goal is to make a quick buck on GM's announcement, great, good luck. I'm much more of a long term investor. I DO care, immensely, who has the best batteries. I also care immensely about the race to autonomy, which we haven't really touched upon.