Tesla sells every car they can make. Their backlog is about a year long. We won't know how much demand there is until they can actually meet it.

Batteries cost a lot more decades ago. Car giants could have built electrics but they would have been expensive and short range.

If the trend in battery prices continues, electric cars will have lower sticker prices than ICE cars in a couple years, and then anyone who just wants a good price for a new car will change from an ICE customer to an electric customer.

> Tesla is sexy, sure. But I don't think they proved that people want electric cars.

I'm not sure if this is the right way to frame this. It would probably be better to say something like Tesla proved that EVs are practical and people will buy them.

> Tesla still sells very few cars (~3%). The giants sell a lot more cars

Sure, at the moment. But now you're conflating manufacturer market share with fuel type market share. A better way to think about this in the context of ICE vs EV is to look at the efforts underway by all manufacturers to ramp up EV production. It takes time to do. New companies (Lucid, Rivian, Tesa, etc.) take time to ramp up production. And then if you want to just compare manufacturers against each other with all fuel types combined, you can do that separately, to which I'd say this is not at all surprising given EV makers are new and take time to get market penetration.

> but nothing stopped the car giants from making them decades ago

All of the profit incentives in the world stopped them basically. Everyone was fat and happy with oil for cars, why bother changing anything or doing anything different?