el gato malo

Innovation is a process and it tends to move in sudden jumps when pieces fall into place. It’s vanishingly rare that a thing is developed just once and in one place. Parallel development and multiple discovery is the norm.

When you develop glass, germ theory rapidly and inevitably follows. Glass leads to clear glass which leads to lenses which lead to microscopes which lead people to peer at a drop of water and voila, germ theory. It happens all over the world at the same time.

EVs are no different. Tesla did not invent them. They’ve been around since the early 1800’s. they have just never been practical for most automotive applications. It’s still not clear they are. They are expensive and have limited range and long charge times.

But they ARE getting better. TSLA was early, but innovation is not driven by them. They took the tech of others (Panasonic, NVDA) and launched early. they were OK launching a beta product. The rest of the industry was not. They wanted 1.0 to meet levels of safety and function

Going first does not make you the “innovator”. It may mean you were reckless. This tech was available to all and everyone could see the writing on the wall from regulations demanding a move to EV (itself a terrible way to pick winners as oppose to using competition and merit).

“a product so good we have to force you to build and buy them” is not much of a slogan. But perhaps now EV’s will get competitive. Perhaps not. But the idea that they would not have come into the mass market (assuming they do) sans tesla is pretty far fetched.

This tech has been being developed all over the world by hundreds of companies. The holy grails of energy density as high as gasoline and refills as rapid as a gas station remain elusive. I suspect those will be needed for a real mass market in the absence of regulator diktat.

Lots of folks are working on it. Some will crack it. This is how innovation works. But it was not tesla that made this happen. They are just a bit player that went early into a space whose tech was not really baked yet.

When historians look back on the EV market, $TSLA will look like Davenport: a small niche product not suited for a mass market nor truly mass produced that was an early stab at “getting it right” that missed. But EV’s will keep going.

Saying “tesla will fail” says nothing about EV’s as a whole. Keep that in mind.

Being skeptical of $TSLA is not being “anti-EV” not anti gaia or anti progress or humanity. It’s just a simple statement about one company’s ability to make good products at a profit. Let’s just make sure we keep that context in mind. It’s an important one.