Pretty much thanks to Tesla.
Electric cars wouldn't be anywhere near where they are today without him - whatever we may think of his personality, the advancements in tech and environmental impacts for generations to come are real.
Electric cars wouldn't be anywhere near where they are today without him - whatever we may think of his personality, the advancements in tech and environmental impacts for generations to come are real.
The defenders come out of the woodwork at approximately the same moment the attackers do.
> The need for a certain portion of the internet to defend Musk at all times is absolutely weird.
is no weirder than the certain portion of the internet that needs to criticize Musk at all times. In fact, the people that feel the need to interject criticisms of Musk into conversations that aren't really about him clearly have Musk living rent-free in their heads to a greater degree than the defenders do.
Tesla did innovate, but frankly not as much as many people want to give them credit for. And a lot of the innovation happened before Musk even joined, at least when it comes to basic EV tech, not talking about AutoPilot or whatever.
Their real achievement was creating a market and interest. This new consumer and investor interest was also in large part to Musk throwing his ego around in public. A lot of other car makers had models in late stage development phases too, but didn't really see enough interest and a market need to bring those models forward to reach production. They were fat and happy, selling their fossil fuel models.
There were a number of years when a Tesla was the only good EV you could buy, and they forced the entire industry to take note and actually develop their own programs. (Fast forward to today, and it's sometimes pure comedy to see latecomers such as Mazda's first attempt being a complete "what?" with their first EV having under half the range of and being more expensive than a Model 3.)
Sure, someone else could eventually have gotten there, but Musk and Tesla were the ones who did it - and I believe with a rather significant margin of time.
There's a long list of things I don't like about personalities and design choices, but I feel it's ok to keep that separate from the above.
(I don't own an EV. Still saving and waiting for the right time to upgrade from a 10 year old Subaru Outback ICEV bought new then.)
No the entire system efficiency is whats hard and is why Tesla is way in front of the competition with regards to performance and range. Batteries have so far been a commodity - 18500 & 21700s, its only now that Tesla is starting to focus on that part of the system in reference to Battery Day.