Auto industry innovation is attracting tens of billions of dollars in capital expenditures and top engineering talent as companies worldwide are competing to survive in a world of autonomous and electric vehicles.

Traditional automobile giants such as General Motors (NYSE:GM), Ford (NYSE) and Toyota (NYSE:TM) are facing upstart entrants such as Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), Waymo and Mobileye as all manufacturers head toward an uncertain future. Tesla’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk said in an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes television program that his electric car company was losing $100 million a week and “running out of money” before it created a third assembly line in a parking lot under a tent that boosted production by 50 percent.

That creative move was borne out of desperation as cash was dwindling and Tesla needed to turn a third-quarter profit. Musk had projected a profit despite two years of quarterly losses and also succeeded in giving Tesla only its third positive quarterly earnings report in its 15-year existence.

The billions of dollars required to develop autonomous, or self-driving, vehicles means that companies seeking to avoid a financial wipe-out must “reinvent” themselves as the auto industry faces competitive headwinds, according to a report from Bain Capital. One challenge faced by many legacy industry leaders is that they have underinvested in new technologies and now must push ahead technologically or perish.

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Paul Dykewicz, www.pauldykewicz.com, is an accomplished, award-winning journalist who has written for Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, USA Today, the Journal of Commerce,Seeking Alpha, GuruFocus and other publications and websites. Paul is the editor of StockInvestor.com and DividendInvestor.com, a writer for both websites and a columnist. He further is the editorial director of Eagle Financial Publications in Washington, D.C., where he edits monthly investment newsletters, time-sensitive trading alerts, free e-letters and other investment reports. Paul previously served as business editor of Baltimore’s Daily Record newspaper. Paul also is the author of an inspirational book, “Holy Smokes! Golden Guidance from Notre Dame’s Championship Chaplain,” with a foreword by former national championship-winning football coach Lou Holtz.