Oil prices, pollution laws and incentives did, Tesla was the only one in position to profit for it timely
Every company has an electric car in their blueprints, Tesla is the right size to benefit for the small demand that the market created on its own
They turned a hundred million so profit this year right? That's not even enough to consider ending the market for the larger companies. Comparatively they could earn those profit just by tweaking a decimal on their car financing services interest.
Most people will resist change until they are forced into it. Even then some people will literally go down with the ship.
That doesn't correspond with the practical realities. Here are some battery electrics that will be released across the next two years, some of which are already available:
https://www.myev.com/research/interesting-finds/hottest-new-...
Look at what a company like Hyundai is doing. Hyundai produces hydrogen fuel cell cars:
https://www.hyundai.de/Modelle/NEXO.html
Hyundai (with Kia) produces EV versions of the Hyundai Kona and the Kia Niro, two battery electrics with good range at a more affordable price than the luxury EVs:
https://www.hyundai.co.uk/new-cars/kona-electric
https://www.kia.com/uk/new-cars/all-new-e-niro/
Hyundai also has plans for on-car solar:
https://electrek.co/2018/10/31/hyundai-kia-solar-roof-electr...
I don't think any of this adds up to them hating EVs. Hyundai is ahead of most companies on the road to the practical, affordable EV.
They have those blueprints because of Tesla, they were not going to be nearly as quick to market with electric cars before hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1
https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/ZEROEMISSION/HISTORY/RNESSA...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV
they're all sitting on a lot of technology, the current volume doesn't justify them to push into production, where tesla could use their gung-ho startup attitude and startup capital to run off the equivalent of rounding error for the establishment
They're currently down about $15 billion dollars (and a couple billion more in incentives).
There is a reason GM, Audi, Daimler etc are shifting to electric vehicles.
GM turned a loss selling nine million vehicles or so, opening a whole line to enter a market which is moving just one million units or so competing with players like Tesla that operate at almost a loss make zero sense.
They'll keep their design fresh and up to date to be ready when the time comes, but so far it's territory of steps and smaller companies that can profit from small production runs
The Tesla Model S, in its main US market, is the leader in the luxury car market. Model 3 is the #1 selling car by revenue.
Production is limited to 2 US factories. Worldwide numbers go up fast when they have a Euro factory, Chinese factory, etc.
> GM turned a loss selling nine million vehicles or so, opening a whole line to enter a market which is moving just one million units or so competing with players like Tesla that operate at almost a loss make zero sense.
And yet they are doing it.
Yes that why they killed the volt
What separates the high achievers, apart from any basic talent and training, is a personality that doesn't experience the relevant kind of pain or discomfort that would discourage them from the task.
For a lot of sports, that means overcompetitive asshole. For a lot of businesses, the same. That personality gets a lot of leeway to optimize towards linear goals. But then you go looking at certain niches and there is nuance. Sometimes it's endurance - masochism. Someone who runs ultramarathons, or repeatedly starts over a speedrun of a classic video game. Sometimes it's a poker player or day trader who can't feel the weight of moving around big stakes. There are many roles where the successful personality isn't the competitive narcissist. But in the specific case of small companies that get very big very quickly, they are prolific.
And that's a point which helps me personally, since I know some things about my comfort zone by now and where the standard advice is going to fail. Only some people are numbed enough to simply "hustle" and succeed. For the rest it's more like a quest to find the right kinds of challenges, the ones that they are most likely to engage with at a high level. When they can do that, people call them a genius. But from their own perspective, it's ordinary, or only somewhat more painful than doing nothing. And this quality of personality matching a high level skillset runs throughout our fictional characters, despite Western society nominally engaging with beliefs of anyone being equally able to learn to do anything. I think we know this and turn our back on it because it uproots several of our major founding myths about society and its potential and whom we should support and how.
Historically we do seem to need "kings" of some form or another. This makes the requirement socially tautological. Kings have to be assholes because people need asshole kings.
My depressing hypothesis is that because the average human is essentially depressed, un-driven, and anhedonic, we depend on being dominated by hyper-driven assholes to reach our full potential.
What's weird about this is that in a way we are using or even enslaving the king. There's an anthropological hypothesis out there that monarchy evolved in part from the practice of human sacrifice, and when a king's company or country does not perform we still do sacrifice them at least in word if not in deed.
I hypothesize that the conventional model of the "great man" has it wrong. It's not the genius of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk that is driving excellence. It's the drive itself. The actual work at SpaceX or Tesla is being done by the employees, but I question whether the employees could drive themselves to do that work given that we are naturally wired to sit around a campfire, eat, fuck, and occasionally go hunting or berry picking. My hypothesis is that without drive and charisma to emotionally mime, most people don't do much.
I've wondered for a long time if the solution might not be superior stimulant medications. Could we have a king in pill form? Could a simple emotional or even metabolic tweak (again pun intended) eliminate much of the need for inspiring leaders to motivate us?
Now I'm incubating this goofball speculation that the post-enlightenment-era rejection of monarchs was driven in part by importation of coffee reducing the need for kings, which is hilarious and utterly insane. I better get back to work.
Edit:
This whole line of thinking has a big question mark after it. I am speculating and philosophizing, not pronouncing dogma.
I also do not intend anything I wrote as a personal insult against anyone. I've never met Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, and regardless of the circumstances I do think the things they're doing (or did in the former case) are making the world a better place.
I'm just asking if we can find a better way to make the world a better place that is also more compassionate and pleasant at the immediate interpersonal level. You don't solve problems by denying unpleasant realities, so I'm exploring what I see as an unpleasant reality.
I remember years ago reading article after article and forum post after forum post about how once we finally deplete oil transportation will revert to the 19th century. I don't read that anymore.
I have little doubt that without Tesla you wouldn't see a dozen other EVs on the market. You might have one or two crappy "compliance cars," but nobody else would be striving to make EVs anyone actually wants to buy.
I am not arguing with you. I don't disagree with much of anything that you wrote.
One of the things that keeps me up at night and frankly depresses me is the question: can you lead or otherwise achieve great things without being an asshole?
Steve Jobs? Asshole. Winston Churchill? Asshole. Stanley Kubrick? Asshole. Bill Gates? Quieter, but judging from MS's behavior in the 80s and 90s, asshole. I could go on.
I'm a founder and have been trying for quite a while to build something great without being an asshole or a total workaholic. It's hard, and I sometimes worry that I'm failing.
Anyone got any good inspiring counterexamples?
I have a speculation about why this might be. The human brain is wired for the much slower, simpler life of a hunter-gatherer. In a modern context most people exist in a state of low-grade depression. We're not really all that driven and our appetite for opportunity and action is calibrated for a world where opportunities for those things are much more rare.
There are ways of tweaking oneself chemically (pun intended): caffeine, amphetamine, cocaine, modafinil. Unfortunately all these have side effects. They accelerate thought but they also muddle or impair it.
But...
Occasionally you get people who are naturally wired with an extreme degree of drive and charisma. It's not that these people are necessarily smarter than everyone else, though some are certainly smart. It's that they operate naturally at a pace that fits the modern world.
Here's where the magic comes in.
Humans are deeply mimetic. We pick up and unconsciously mirror the states of those around us. It's part of why concentrated centers of excellence such as those found in urban settings are often so mysteriously alluring and powerful. When we are around people who are driven to excellence, it increases our drive to excellence.
So you get this positive emotional-mimetic field around these people. Everyone else around them gets tweaked up too.
Unfortunately these traits seem coincident with narcissism, antisocial personality disorders, even full on psychopathy in some cases. So you have these inspiring, driven, animating assholes that seem superhumanly powerful simply because they are not (in modern terms) naturally depressed and anhedonic.
Like I said it's depressing. This is one of those thoughts where if I were proven to be wrong I'd celebrate.