Tesla’s head of production is going to EV startup Lucid Motors

I don't doubt you, but I would love to learn more.

Not always the best decision, but usually the kind of thought process one goes though.

Not necessarily. Sometimes you have a well defined problem and your advantage is in better execution.

Great point that Tesla is an EV innovation incubator. High praise.

There is a good argument to be made that the cap should have been US wide and not per-company, because now it’s incentivizing late-movers who didn’t have to carry the initial higher R&D burden.

There’s even a small chance this might actually be amended by Congress.

But on the flip side, a per company cap diversifies the knowledge and experience and drives increased competition, even if it is late to the game.

But all of this goes to the consumer in the form of a demand side tax non-refundable tax credit. It will not help if they fail to get into production due to liquidity problems. Many businesses have failed trying to get to that point.

Once Model Y and Model 3 are globally available at scale, those lines cover the budget market. Tesla will be free to jack up the S and X prices into the mid $100s and spend that money on interiors. People will use ride sharing revenues to help cover the higher monthly payment.

Even if the autonomy part is delayed, this next generation of interiors, led by Lucid, is supporting Lyft and Uber drivers to make those higher payments, with premium vehicle ride share rates.

(1) Semi won’t need consumer design resources. And 3 and Y can be in design freeze for a while. Those teams will be 100% about production efficiency for a decade or so. So after Pickup, what else can Franz work on besides Roadster and S & X interior luxury? Franz had a fun to his head when designing the first Model S. With the freedom to start over and the needs of of autonomous taxi services at front of mind, I think Franz could do a lot. And depending on how Pickup goes we might see a more radical styling on the Model S. The 3/Y can be the conservative models, S/X inevitably have to be about passion.

The US has over 250 million privately owned vehicles that use an internal combustion engine for locomotion. We have 4 million miles of roads and the average commute is 25 minutes. How exactly would you structure a mass public transit system to accommodate this demand?

What has being "American" got to do with anything? Are electric vehicles not useful elsewhere? I'm not American and I think what hes doing is a great idea.

>A better future doesn’t involve better cars. Cheaper or more efficient use of energy is simply going to increase energy consumption.

Why do you assume your vision is what everyone wants or should want? Musk is doing something he believes in rather than simply talk about it. Why the needless hate?

The examples you cite are Internet companies. Internet companies are peculiar because they exploit the economies of scale of the Internet to primarily offer services, not goods (read physical products).

If being last mover offered an advantage to players selling goods, then Windows Phone ought to have trounced Apple iPhone and Google Android since they were a late entrant in the smartphone movement when the paradigm shifted from physical keyboards to touchscreens.