Not OP but I remember watching a movie "Who killed the electric car?" in highschool. It's about the EV1, an electric car by GM in the 90s. It had a range of 70-100 miles. If I remember correctly the movie kind of insinuates that the oil lobby ultimately prevented the model from releasing/selling well. So just based on that, the knowledge that electric cars are a viable substitute for a lot (in Europe I'd say most) of use cases has been quite readily available.
But that's the problem in OP's reasoning. Simply knowing that electric cars will dominate in the future is pretty worthless as investment advice. Especially when we are talking about tesla, which's stock price is entirely decoupled from any fundamental values. Today, I actually think that becoming one of many car makers is the best-case scenario tesla can hope for. It was always the question whether they can get enough of a head start in self-driving and battery tech BEFORE traditional car makers start making EVs. Those have decades of a head-start in every other aspect of car making. And to me it seems that most of them fully committed to EVs in the last 1-2 years. So will Tesla's advantage in battery tech buy them enough time to make cars that are as safe and reliable as traditional cars?
Also: I really don't know much about cars, so I might be wrong about pretty much everything I just said :) But it shows nicely that you can find logically sound arguments about future developments which are worth absolutely nothing on the stock market. Just look at the stock market since the beginning of Covid.
