All true, however:
1) It will be interesting to see if that level of production continues or if it will plateu. I suspect a pandemic induced spike and that we're now entering a point of everyone who wants an ebike already has one and there'll be a slump of -3 years before people start upgrading.
2) The majority of those motors have been fitted to touring/city bikes, not MTBs. It probably varies by location, but eMTBs are going to be a smaller subset of the ebike market.
Yes, but the point was simply that the volume of all of Bosch's e-drives are in the same ballpark as the volume of all of Tesla's EV models. Sure, Bosch has a few more drive unit variations than Tesla has EV models, but those drive variations have more similarity to one another from an engineering/design/manufacturing efficiency perspective vs. Tesla's different models of EV's do. All in all, I think the volume efficiencies are roughly in the same ballpark, not a stark difference.
Thus we need to explain the pricing disconnects of e-MTBs vs. EVs through the greater vertical integration and corporate efficiency that Tesla has. E-Bike manufacturers are not vertically integrated at all, they pretty much buy every component from suppliers, and those suppliers make high margins on those components. Especially manufacturers like Bosch, who have robust, powerful, efficient drive units with proven reliability.
The reason Tesla is such an efficient manufacturer is because they had to compete head-to-head against a mature, ubiquitous technology (internal combustion vehicles) with a technology that wasn't mature, all the components were not already available from suppliers in high volume, batteries used to be very expensive, etc. In other words, Tesla knew they had to cut fat out of the organization, and out of the manufacture, relentlessly or their products would not be competitive with ICE in the marketplace. So they focused on getting costs down like a laser, right up to the point of not spending money on advertising. Because, ultimately, the consumer has to pay for all that advertising. Now we have watched lithium batteries fall in price, while increase in longevity and power density for two decades, solid state inverters and electric motor design has matured and increased in efficiency of manufacture, specialized chips, controllers and sensors have decreased in prices, etc. and Tesla is vertically integrated so they have to send suppliers very little money per car (vs. their competition who has to sell their EV's at a loss).
Meanwhile, the e-MTB manufacturers are basically assemblers of parts from their many suppliers. All they build is the frame, a lot of suppliers are making nice margins on every component. That means a lot of companies are sucking at the teat when you pull your wallet out. If Tesla made e-MTBs using the same lean manufacturing techniques, low corporate overhead and high volume, vertically integrated purchasing, you could buy a state-of-the-art, full suspension
e-MTB that was superior in many ways to the works of art we see in the marketplace today, for about 1/2 to 1/3 the price. But it would have taken them many years of development, at annual losses, to get there. They would need billions of dollars, even while being as efficient as possible, to develop their own gearing systems for their drive units (and they would look nothing like the current systems).
In this alternate reality the FUD (AKA fake news) would come not from oil companies and legacy automakers, but companies like Bosch, Shimano, Brose, Bafang, etc. who were being displaced by a company willing to re-think every design decision to make the lightest, most robust, most efficient components for less manufacturing and distribution cost.
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