Tesla is a great industrial drama. Will Elon Musk’s vision of electric vehicles propel the hydrocarbon-based auto industry into a greener, sustainable future?

Or will the dream of changing the world by integrating solar power, battery storage and electric vehicles crash and burn under a mountain of debt and unrealistic promises?

Despite recurring predictions of failure, Tesla Motors Inc. TSLA, +1.63% has survived 13 years since it was founded by a handful of visionaries. Tesla has become an iconic brand whose popularity is reaching beyond the 1% who can pay $100,000-plus for a car.

After Tesla’s $35,000 Model 3 was announced in late March, 400,000 prospective buyers put down deposits within two weeks. The cheapest Tesla goes into production in 2017.

And contrary to some predictions, Tesla’s $5 billion battery plant in Nevada is being opened with limited production set to begin later this year. Tesla expects the so-called Gigafactory to drive down the cost of lithium-ion batteries used in every Tesla vehicle. Success of the Gigafactory is critical to price and output projections of the Model 3. Here’s a video I made of the factory, whose grand opening is scheduled for July 29.

Similarly, Tesla has proven naysayers wrong by winning unprecedented acclaim from curmudgeonly Consumer Reports magazine, which for two years running named the Model S “the best overall vehicle.” Motor Trend magazine in 2013 designated the Model S its car of the year. Some bad news came last October: Consumer Reports pulled its “recommended” designation because of an “array of detailed and complicated maladies.”

Tesla’s share price has soared 861% since its 2010 initial public offering and has defied critics who have repeatedly said that Tesla, like a tech stock in 1999, is a bubble waiting to burst. (The shares are down 14% in the past year.)

But the negative side of the ledger on Tesla is equally persuasive. Critics observe that Tesla loses over $15,000 on every car it sells and could not exist without government subsidies. The share price, they assert, is grossly overvalued, giving Tesla an inflated market value of $34 billion, a figure nearly four times bigger than Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV’s FCAU, -3.50% $9 billion. For comparison, Fiat Chrysler produced 4.7 million cars and light trucks in 2015 versus 50,000 for Tesla.

Ford Motor Co.’s F, -4.97% market value is $55 billion, and General Motors Co.’s GM, -4.76% is $50 billion. GM’s stock trades at a trailing price-to-earnings ratio of 4.1, while Ford trades at a P/E of 6.2. Tesla’s P/E is a large “N/A,” as it has no profits.

Noting that Tesla plans to invest over $1 billion this year but doesn’t have enough cash, blogger Andreas Hopf accuses Tesla CEO Elon Musk of “cleverly operating on the boundary of fiction and reality.” Hopf predicts that to meet its investment plan, Tesla will have to quickly sell more stock.

A further negative is the dilution of Tesla shares that will occur if Musk’s plan for a $2.9 billion stock-only merger with money-losing SolarCity Corp. SCTY, -4.85% is approved. Musk is the largest shareholder in both companies, and SolarCity is headed by a cousin, Lyndon Rive.

Musk, in his just-released master plan for Tesla, says integrating rooftop solar and battery storage can’t occur if Tesla and SolarCity are different companies. That combination, he says, with solar panels on the roof producing overnight the electricity to power the Tesla in the garage, “empowers individuals as their own utility.”

Perhaps Tesla’s most ambitious target is boosting production at the Fremont, Calif., factory by 10-fold to 500,000 cars a year. Musk speaks of “building the machine to build the machine,” using the language of physics to assert that vehicle production can be many times more efficient. Tesla, he says, “will design a factory like a high-speed computer.”

Tesla expects to produce and deliver 50,000 vehicles during the second half of 2016, which is roughly equal to its output for all of 2015.

Finally, there is safety. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating the May 2016 death of a Tesla driver in Florida who was using the car’s Autopilot function when it collided with a truck. It was the first fatality involving a Tesla car using the Autopilot function.

Musk vigorously defended Autopilot, saying: “It would no more make sense to disable Tesla’s Autopilot, as some have called for, than it would to disable autopilot in an aircraft.” He emphasizes that Autopilot technology is in “beta” and still being perfected.

So the jury on Tesla is still out. It may be that Musk, the highly driven 45-year-old born in South Africa, is a genius on a par with Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison.

One thing for sure is that Musk and Tesla are disrupters to the car industry, not unlike Uber is to taxis and Airbnb is to hotels.

Keith Crain, the respected editor of Automotive News, is a Musk enthusiast, calling the Tesla CEO a brilliant man who outperformed the established car companies in creating a revolutionary vehicle.