It's long been argued by Jerry Pournelle and others that a fully reusable spacecraft could be built by being "starkly conservative" in materials and technology, but using modern construction techniques.

See The Rocket Company

Grasshopper seems to be following this play book.

It's worth mentioning that their "less conservative" VTVL rocket is currently hitting about 10% of the DC-X's ~3100m record.

While the grasshopper is very cool, the concept of a VTVL rocket is not new. Hell, the Apollo Lunar Module technically landed and took off afterwards, as well!

To say this is highly disingenuous, and disregards the massive amount of work into the energy management system researched by Tesla.

Put a ton of batteries into a car? Yeah, that's how they get 265 miles to a charge. Clearly all other EV cars just need a ton of batteries to solve the range issue.

Looking at the spectacular flop of the Fisker, packaging is far too often understated. Most people don't understand how complicated automotive systems are and how difficult it is to integrate them all together without numerous bugs and annoyances. Most big name automakers use off the shelf systems from third parties. Tesla did not.

Tesla won the highest score ever achieved from Consumer Reports while Fisker perished with a similar formula. That isn't simply luck.

In fact, Tesla's approach to battery packs is revolutionary - it goes completely against the status quo in the same way that Google's use of commodity hardware went against the status quo in the late 90s. Tesla packs use about 7000 commodity li-ion cells which are arranged in a pack with individual software-controlled charge management.

A user on the Tesla Motors forum pointed out that if Tesla actually implements their battery patents, the battery pack which was displayed in a National Geographic documentary (pixelated, of course) was in fact a fake.

>Tesla happened to do it when battery technology was just good enough to work

You say that as if it was coincidental...

Before the Model S, purchasing an electric car would mean that you are sacrificing performance, luxury, styling, and range for a clean, efficient, electric car. With the Model S, the only sacrifice you make is the range. Everything else is on par, or better, than other vehicles in it's class. People aren't only buying it because it's electric, they're buying it because it's a great car.

Think about gasoline cars. People have been building those for ages, and it's not exactly difficult to make a car: you just put a frame, an internal combustion engine, and a steering system together, right? And yet it's still not that easy to make a well selling automobile.

The number of new automakers who enter the market over time and do very well is very small.

The thing about Tesla is not that they managed to make an electric car, the important thing is they managed to make one with all of the right tradeoffs and design choices to be a car that people actually wanted to buy. That's a big deal even for conventional automobiles.

Moreover, Tesla has done the most important thing possible with electric cars: they've made them no longer a joke. That will make a much bigger difference in the future decades regardless of whether Tesla continues to succeed or not. Now that electric cars are in many people's eyes a legitimate, and even perhaps enviable, vehicle to own people will start evaluating them on the merits and increasingly choosing to buy them. Which will lead to more and more successful electric car models and companies and a snowball effect in terms of the amount of cumulative profits from electric car sales which will get plowed back into R&D for electric car development. All of which is an absurdly huge win for electric vehicles.

Now, it's not as though Musk did something absurdly special with Tesla (heck, he didn't even found the company), but there's a strong argument he didn't do so with SpaceX either. The Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 are not technological marvels, they're simply, practical sensible designs well-executed. The same could be said of the Tesla vehicles. However, today it seems like simple practicality well-executed is hard to come by in most industries, and he deserves a lot of credit for putting his money and time on the line and staying the course.

It is obviously not just that. You just simply don't put together four wheels with motors and a battery pack and call it a car. Forgetting about everything inside (interior design, user interaction, fancy touchscreens, etc) and looking at it from a point of systems integration, it is really hard to design good suspension systems, optimize the aerodynamics and tune the dynamics of the system to have good handling on a broad set of road conditions. Tesla got it right and the big auto makers will eventually get it right too, but by no means is an easy task.