The industry has never known greater disruption than in the age of electrification, but those doing the disrupting have invariably struggled when it comes to the business of building cars.
For all the well-funded, starry-eyed and bushy-tailed start-ups over the past decade, only really one has become a household name.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where Tesla has succeeded where others have failed, but it lies somewhere in the combination of three things: being the first true mass-market electric car maker and thus being the leader and not the follower; building a cult-like following around the brand; and being belligerent in its approach to almost everything, accepting no convention as something that can’t be challenged. Combine these three and the investors have never wavered.
For me, what also slips under the radar is how Tesla gave itself the time to learn how to make cars and develop technology by making its first model a development of an existing car (remember the Lotus Elise-based Roadster still?) rather than doing everything from scratch.
Building cars is up there with the most complicated industrial processes in existence. You have to bring together hundreds and thousands of different parts, both physical and digital, and get them all to interact reliably with one another.
Then you have to satisfy all kinds of different legislation, from safety to emissions, and still make something that is good to look at, and people will want to buy. Yet the price they pay only ever leaves you a tiny margin, and you have to spend the next few years looking after them and the car, stepping in if any of those thousands of parts goes wrong.
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