Senior board members from Audi, Porsche and BMW preceded Elon Musk on stage at the Automotive News World Congress in Detroit, the audience full of other high-ranking executives who had paid US$1,600+ per person to attend. Or more likely, audience members had employers or companies that had deemed it a worthy investment for them to attend, to absorb cutting edge thinking from some of the leaders in the luxury vehicle universe. Plus Tesla.

Strictly by the sales numbers, this small, California start-up is a mere annoying fly in the stables of these luxury powerhouses. In its eight years on the market, Tesla has sold fewer than 50,000 cars in total, compared to 1.8 million BMWs sold in 2014. Even just last year’s BMW 3 Series sales dwarfed Tesla’s cumulative production so far, with BMW selling 476,792 3 Series models in 2014.

And yet, there’s no doubt as to whom this well-heeled audience was most interested to see. Both in the banquet room where it was held, and the media room where Musk’s on stage interview was broadcast live on monitors, the room inflated with onlookers as Musk’s appointed hour approached. Unlike the three other executives, he didn’t have a slick 20-minute corporate presentation that seemed to tout the brand’s products and research in similar areas: autonomous vehicles, mass urbanization, and yes, alternative energy vehicles, mostly plug-in hybrids, but also some diesel talk as well.

No, Musk’s speech was shorter than his introduction. Automotive News editor and publisher Jason Stein touched on Musk’s Canadian background (his mother’s Canadian) and success with both Tesla and intergalactic transport company SpaceX, with no PowerPoint presentation at all.

“I believe that all transport, with the ironic exception of rockets, will one day go fully electric – it’s just a matter of when,” said Musk. He reiterated his invite to all automakers to use Tesla’s growing network of Superchargers, before laying down why he believes lower gas prices mustn’t slow EV development.

“Fracking probably increases the accessible oil and gas in the world perhaps by a factor of 10… so the potential harm to the climate is much greater than before,” he said. “We can’t rely on scarcity to drive the price of oil and gas high; so we have to figure out how to make electric cars themselves compelling, without the economic forcing function of high gas prices.”

More Related Articles

No marketing plans. No whiz-bang preview of what Tesla technology or vehicle will come next, to a crowd of potential luxury car buyers. Where the other presentations were slick and polished, Musk’s was a short but cerebral mix of environmental evangelism and economics lecture.

As always, Tesla and Musk himself stood out from the automotive norm.

In Canada, though the Model S arrived slightly later than in the U.S., and the first Supercharger only arrived this past fall, Tesla appears to be racing to catch up the production schedule and Supercharger network here. The 691-hp all-wheel-drive Model S P85D super sedan started arriving in late 2014, the less powerful but similarly AWD 85D is set for this spring, while the long-awaited Model X is due in the third quarter of this year and the approximately US$35K Model 3 planned to arrive by the end of 2017.

All of this matches the planned launch timing in the U.S., while nine Superchargers are now up and running in Canada (five out west, two in Ontario, two in Quebec), with another six under construction now to open soon, said Martin Paquet, Tesla Canada’s northeastern region sales manager. By the end of 2015, Tesla plans to have 23 sites in operation, he said, with major corridors enabling travel between Vancouver-Calgary-Edmonton in the west, and the Detroit-Toronto-Montreal-Quebec City corridor and into New Brunswick in the east.

Contrast that with all other mainstream automotive companies. Up until mid-January 2015, Nissan Canada insisted that it was not in the EV infrastructure business, despite significant sums spent in the US, UK, Japan and elsewhere on fast chargers. This infrastructure allows its Leaf owners to travel between cities within reasonable if still longer timeframes (less than half an hour for a complete charge). But just before the opening of the Montreal auto show, Nissan Canada announced a partnership with the province of Quebec to fund 25 DC fast chargers for the province’s Electric Circuit public charging network, with 20 to be installed by the end of this year, and another five at least in 2016. The EC is targeting at least 50 DC fast-charging sites across the province, with these 25 to offer competing SAE Combo and CHAdeMO electric ‘fuel nozzles,’ which is interesting because Nissan can only use the CHAdeMO wands on its current Leaf (along with Mitsubishi i-MiEV and Kia Soul EV owners), while the only current cars that can use the SAE Combo ones are the BMW i3 and fleet-only Chevrolet Spark EV.

More Related Articles

Granted, neither of these are the quickest EV fast-charging systems around – that crown belongs to Tesla’s Superchargers. And just like Tesla’s EVs, they’re not only the quickest, but the most advanced fast chargers in the business.

So to recap: an all-electric vehicle lineup. Commission-free, company-owned retailers. An aggressive and effective company-owned fast-charging network. Regular free upgrades to production car software, with available battery upgrades on the Model S and soon the Roadster too. A business plan that invites (so far reluctant) competition from much larger corporate rivals. And, oh yes, a US$5 billion gamble on what will become the largest lithium-ion production facility in the world, with the Gigafactory in Nevada within a few years.

Other luxury automakers are certainly noticing its small but quickly growing sales. They may be far from BMW 3 Series sales, but most of Tesla’s sales at least flirted with if not blew by the symbolic $100,000 price threshold, especially in Canada, first with its six-figure Roadster and now with the Model S, which starts at C$82,270, but quickly rises to just over $94,000 for the larger 85-kWh battery that most buyers covet. Executives from Cadillac, Volvo, Lexus and massive US auto dealer group AutoNation (which feature BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz and Audi dealers, among many others), have all professed interest in Tesla’s mall/boutique showrooms and online sales models, with plans in place to mirror some or many of its retail elements.

Making both Tesla and Elon Musk increasingly difficult if not impossible to ignore, even for luxury powerhouses, no matter what the sales figures say.

Connect with Autos.ca