Interestingly, the idea of a car company owning the charging station network was presented by Cringely on his column years ago. [1]

Just listened to the podcast the other day and was struck by how similar Tesla's model is to what he presented. The entire segment is around the question of "how would Steve Jobs run a car company".

1: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20081207_0055...