Tesla Motors a big company that will be overcoming the giants car companies?

Most electric and hybrid vehicles are sold in countries where government incentives are the strongest. There aren't many countries where fully electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids amounted to more than 1 percent of new cars sold in 2016, and in most of them, government stimulus -- of both the stick and the carrot variety -- is strong. As soon as the stimulus drops off, so do electric car sales. That happened in Denmark last year, where an attempt to phase out tax breaks resulted in a 71 percent drop in battery-powered vehicle sales and a 49 percent reduction in hybrid sales in 2016, according to the International Energy Agency. It happened in the Netherlands, where tax breaks on hybrids (but not on battery-powered cars) were cut and sales plummeted by 50 percent.

Because suppliers capture a bigger share of the profit from electric vehicles than from traditional cars, large volumes are necessary for production to make economic sense for companies even when each individual car is sold at a profit (something that BMW says is true of its electric models, but Tesla can't say of its pre-Model 3 range). Automakers that produce electric cars in China and Europe are more likely to achieve large volumes than Tesla, with its U.S.-based production. In January through April 2017, 126,000 plug-in vehicles (hybrid and battery-powered) were sold in China and Europe, compared with 41,000 in the U.S.