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Comment by legulere | Hacker News Reader

> the incumbents who said that his ideas would never work

which ideas? Is there really that much innovative stuff by elon musk?

My impression is, that it was always more about economic feasibility than technical feasibility. Competitors to Tesla and SpaceX existed before those were founded but they lacked the investment.

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I would say at the very least, the construction of the Model S and the supercharger network are hugely innovative.

But Tesla cars are just that - cars. Nor were they even the first electric cars.

Don't get me wrong, they're fantastic and innovative, but the basic technological underpinnings have been long established.

I'd say Tesla's main innovation was on the business end: they realized that batteries are expensive, so EVs must be expensive, and trying to cut corners everywhere else to bring the price down just results in a crappy car people don't want to buy. Instead, make it a great car that's really expensive, but so good that it justifies the high price. Any incumbent could have done this, they just... didn't.

> I would say at the very least, the construction of the Model S and the supercharger network are hugely innovative.

Sure, but not something that critics said was technically impossible (not likely to be viable as a business model, sure, but that's a different class of complaint.)

Depends on what you consider innovation. It's not straight invention when you put useful pieces together, but then again, that describes a lot of useful engineering these days. The inventive parts are already coming, though.

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