98% of what makes a good car has nothing to do with software, which is Google's core expertise. (And to be pedantic, Google's core expertise is cloud infrastructure.)
The fact that people love to complain about car software is testament to the fact that the rest of their car works really bloody well.
Tesla is absolutely not beating the big players of the industry. They have serious quality problems, they have a hard time scaling up manufacturing, and they aren't building affordable cars. ($35,000 MSRP Model 3s - the price of a Mercedes C - is not what most of America thinks of when you say 'affordable'. It's low-end luxury.)
They are successful, in the sense that they sell a premium EV with a long range. How much competition have they had in this market, to date?
If they were building ICE vehicles, premium or otherwise, they'd have been eviscerated by both consumers, and their competitors.
