We get the billionaires we deserve?

Doesn’t have to be a billionaire, but we need somebody to take the lead on vehicle electrification.

Today big carmakers and governments are taking the lead but that wouldn’t have happened if Musk hadn’t forced the issue.

The Nissan Leaf came out in the same timeframe, simply because the time was ripe for electric vehicles, the technology was in place. We'd still have electric vehicles, but we'd have missed out on the self-driving hype.

Tesla though created the psychology that an electric car could be a premium car which relaxed the economics and eased ‘range anxiety’ and concerns about performance. That is, other luxury sedans are ‘nothing special’ just expensive and prove the owner has bad judgement, the Tesla was so sexy it got my wife’s attention.

Meanwhile in Japan electric vehicles were a niche product that took off when the time was right. The psychology around automobiles is just plain weird, especially in the US.

In Japan they tear down houses and build new ones. They hire architects to design houses!

They also make cars that are good for 300,000 miles but sell them at 30,000 miles to people in the third world.

They are weird in their own way,