Cars attracted frenzied speculation from the start. As Warren Buffett likes to point out, most investors got burnt: of 2,000 US car companies at the start of the 20th century three endured. “Of course, the thing you should have been doing,” the Sage of Omaha has remarked more than once, “was shorting horses.”
Investors are once more captivated by cars, this time electric and autonomous ones. Unlike 100 years ago, however, there are not 2,000 companies on which to bet. Some might look to Google parent Alphabet or Apple, the technology groups for whom cars are just a large research cost; most, though, alight on Tesla, the electric carmaker.
Yet it is not certain that Tesla has the staying power of a General Motors rather than the shorter life of a Winton Motor Carriage Company or one of the other original also-rans. And while the market seems to have identified traditional carmakers as the “horses”, they are not heading for the knacker’s yard and could adapt to a new market.