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Comment by gorkemyurt | Hacker News Reader

I would say Tesla is on its way to make an iPhone-like impact, along with other self driving car technologies. I would consider the Tesla's Autopilot to be a blockbuster feature.

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Tesla is important but will never sell anywhere near like an iPhone. Best case, in 10-20 years it's the self-driving fleet of choice and huge chunks of people ditch their cars for on-demand transportation. But even then in rural ares I'll wager there will still be many more people with iPhones than will be using Teslas.

Though I could be wrong.

> Tesla is important but will never sell anywhere near like an iPhone.

One of the best parts about victories that large is that the benefit decouples from the original product. You don't have to buy an iPhone anymore, you can buy that $4 android touchscreen phone that is dirt cheap but only exists because the iPhone blazed various technical and cultural trails that turned something new and magical into a boring commodity, to the benefit of mankind.

Just as the premium $500 iPad leads to the $50 amazon fire, so too does the $150k tesla lead to the equivalent $20k toyota in a few years. That's a huge deal.

And there is the supply chain argument.. A Drone is basically a flying smartphone. Every new hardware product uses the smartphone supply chain. Imagine the effects of electric car/battery supply chain, one obvious effect is that everything else is going to be electric from buses to boats. We can also see the effects of the battery tech on solar power. Once people can efficiently store the solar energy they produce themselves for days, and even sell it to their neighbors through blockchain.

"Tesla is important but will never sell anywhere near like an iPhone."

Well, you could say that about almost any other consumer product. The iPhone is a success orders of magnitude larger than the standard, IMO.

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