Tesla is ahead of automakers in 3 key categories: Tech money manager

Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images

An employee cleans a Tesla Model 3 electric vehicle on display at the company’s showroom in Newport Beach, California, U.S., on Friday, July 6, 2018.Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Also, the type of battery that Tesla uses gives it an additional edge over other carmakers. Tesla’s vehicles operate with a lithium-ion cylindrical battery like those used in consumer electronics instead of the lithium-ion pouch batteries.

“So Tesla is riding down the consumer electronics cost curve, which is much, much lower than that lithium ion pouch,” Wood said.

“They’ve done an amazing thing from an engineering point of view no one else thought was possible. That puts them way ahead of the game,” she said.

Wood said she expects other car manufacturers will turn to Nvidia for brain power but criticized the chipmaker’s “design cadence.”

“Everybody else will use Nvidia, but their design cadence is more like 3-5 years,” she said. “Tesla’s is every year to two years, so completely different dynamic.”

Tesla, Wood said, has also collected billions of miles of data from its own customers and continues to gather more than a billion miles each quarter. Google parent Alphabet’s Waymo comes in second, with about 200 million miles worth of data, she added.

“That’s what powers an autonomous vehicle, and that’s where we’re going,” Wood said.