Has Elon Musk's Tesla already won?
asia.nikkei.com
asia.nikkei.com
There is a quote I'm fond of; to paraphrase: To go fast, go alone, to go far, go together.
I while I think that TSLA is doing a great job at innovation, it does seem to be leaving a lot of jobs in uncertainty.
On one hand, those people can be find new, innovative problems to solve now that (theoretically) the problem their job was working on is now solved.
On the other, most people in those positions aren't really in a position to find and pull resources to solve a new problem. Here in the US, there isn't much of a safety net to support them while they're just trying to put food on the table.
Love the progress of Tesla, but I think there needs to be a solution to the jobs that are going to be made obsolete by reducing the number of suppliers and jobs. Don't know if this is a policy issue or a market issue to solve.
As Churchill said, “You can count on Americans to do the right thing after exhausting all other options.”
Sometimes places try to legislate make-work jobs into existence, using laws to create jobs where none are actually needed. There's famous a milton friedman anecdote:
> Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
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Other policies might protect the workers by providing baseline resources (UBI or services), or job retraining. There are all sorts of interesting discussions along these lines.
Similar things have happened in the past, so we do have some idea of the devastation it causes.
While the transition isn't always smooth, new industries always crop up. While driving may be going away, we're seeing many new 'content creation' jobs where people are paid through many platforms (social media, youtube, patreon) to make videos/content about a huge variety of subjects.
I for one, hope the companies focused on making great car hardware win this battle, not the companies that want to turn the car into a giant data harvesting platform.
This is where I think GDPR helps since it adds cost to that data. It really gives you and opportunity to assess the value versus the liability of the data.
My one worry is - since data subsidizes things - will the private alternative even exist?
A friend of mine who worked at a pc manufacturer years ago said they didn't make a linux pc because they made money on the shovelware they bundled with windows pcs. why would they make a linux pc if it were more expensive/cost them money?
As long as it's opt-in, I think it's a fantastic opportunity to improve the performance of these systems.
Remember you already have no privacy on the roads to begin with - traffic cameras, etc are already collecting plenty of data about drivers.
If they compared Saudi Aramco's revenue with Hong Kong's annual GDP, that would make a bit more sense since they're both annual figures.
Governments already operate mostly near maximum revenue. Raise taxes anymore and Capital and labor walk away.
Look at OECD data on tax revenue as percent of GDP [1]. France is at the top at 46.1%. OECD average is 34.2%. US is near the bottom at 26.8%.
Given the big differences in tax rates, it seems implausible every government is at maximum revenue - that might be true for the highest taxing countries like France and Denmark, but is unlikely to be true for a below-average tax country like the US.
The “Laffer curve” determines maximum government revenue - the point at which raising taxes any further would cause overall government revenue to fall. Nobody knows exactly where that point is, but most experts believe the US is a fair way below it (see e.g. [2])
> This indicator relates to government as a whole (all government levels)
"all government levels" means state/provincial/territorial/regional/county/city/town/etc, the whole lot
So I see no evidence it is “misleadingly low”, I think the OECD’s statistics are generally accurate. (More accurate than the UN’s, because the countries whose governments are most likely to commit statistical fraud are not OECD members.)
The supercharger stations along the main highways around the country are well worth the extra price of the cars, if you need to go on a trip outside the cities it will make it much nicer.
They also have the best battery thermal management (in the model Y) with its air conditioner able to route warm or chilled coolant wherever it is needed on the fly inside the vehicle. They are the only ones on the market doing this.
As far as I know they are also the only carmaker working on constructing future car models out of huge die casts, which will greatly speed up production and cut costs. This has nothing to do with being electric cars, any car company could have done this already, but didn't?
Tesla is technically and organizationally ahead of their competitors. The EV market is Tesla's to lose.
Reminds me of Toyota before them. Others could set out to copy everything about Toyota verbatim, and in the 18 months it takes to implement, Toyota will then be 18 months ahead. To get ahead of Toyota, you'd have to leapfrog.
And while the tech will certainly percolate out to others, I can't imagine any existing player successfully adopting Tesla's organizational innovations.
- Shuffling their org charts, so that octovalve and unibottles are even possible.
- Implementing new stuff asap, instead of waiting for model years.
- Aggressively reducing part counts.
- Toyota style vertical integration, reversing decades of outsourcing.
- Learning how to write software.
Etc.
Any way. If Elon Musk can avoid imploding, I think competitors will have to seize the future waves of disruption to displace Tesla. Solid state batteries for EV. And people smarter than me are bullish on hydrogen fuel.
Their battery tech is "good", but that could disappear at any moment with the theoretical advantages of solid state / lithium metal batteries over what is used now.
Their software lead isn't that great however (aside from whatever state their self-driving is in ), that's pretty straightforward software and integration and UI, and really underlines how functionally stupid the incumbent ICE companies are that "over the air update" is magical technology to them.
So Tesla's lead is substantive in the moment, but still very much tenuous.
Many other ICE companies could vertically integrate to match. Every new platform by a company, and EVs generally demand a fundamentally new platform, would be an opportunity to match a great deal of Tesla's vertical integration.
But the mainline ICE makers have been so slow and so stody and so stupid and so corrupt for sooooo long, and that runs far deeper than just the C-suite in their management hierarchies, that they will probably still be asleep at the switch for ten years, despite the fact that nothing besides organizational malaise stops them from changing course.
I'm only a casual consumer of geek news, so I hope someone can chime in to correct me.
Whatever the quality of Tesla's software, the key point is they can write software. I've read (heard) that other car mfgs outsource most or all software development.
Random notion:
Your reply reminded of Apple dabbling with automotive stuff and the general befuddlement about that effort.
It now occurs to me that Apple may be sizing up becoming the software stack provider to the car mfgs cannot write their own.
So the iphone came out in 2007 and pretty much wiped out the competition in phones. blackberry and nokia and even palm were pretty much forgotten in short order. But now there are alternatives. But then apple lost its founder. I wonder what things would be like if steve jobs were around.
It seems that rise and fall of various large auto manufactures are dictated more by the competition between them, than anything the upstart Tesla is doing.
The pivotal question here is whether the existing manufacturers are simply burying their heads in the sand, or are ignoring the growth of EVs due to a principled strategy that has legs. That case has not been made sufficiently clearly, if it even has any merit, in my opinion.
Do they have any interest in fighting for the EV market now? Are there barriers to entry that can stop them from leisurely moving in one the technology has wider adoption and maturity?
Hell, they could even be synergistic. Tesla charges a consumer premium for clean EVs, sells the credits to auto manufacturers, who get to sell high profit/ low mileage vehicles.