Thank goodness that didn't happen. Tesla is doing amazing things and is on track to seriously shake up the automotive industry. I can't imagine that would be true under Google.
If that was the case and with Googles money and power, they might had a better chance of creating a better car as well as adding self driving in the car much faster if we look at google car. ( offcourse that is still years away )
Funnily enough, having loads of cash doesn't always result in a better product. The awful products that cash-rich companies have churned out in the past decade are too numerous to mention (including several examples from Google).
Also, it's not obvious that a software company can build a great car, or a car company can build great software. User-facing car software has been uniformly awful. Google's self-driving car prototypes, while cute (in the so-ugly-its-cute way), aren't particularly inspiring as automobiles. This separation of concerns lets both companies focus on their strengths (which can be combined down the road, as long as the self-driving technology becomes licensable). Although I imagine Tesla will still build its own self-driving technology, and Google will build more buggies. But even that's preferable to acquisition, because it allows cross-pollination of ideas from two separate entities.
There would be a short production run of small cars with cheerful color schemes (not dissimilar from Car2Go styled smartcars) sold as "development" units. Car journalists would have a difficult time getting their hands on them, but google woud ensure that SF tech bloggers would get them. These cars would stand out in public in all of the wrong ways, and soon anyone driving one would be labeled a techie asshole. Future revisions would never materialize.
TL;DR name one company Google acquired where they didn't kill that company's awesome product within a couple years, regardless of how awesome / market-leading / profitable it was.
But more than half the companies in that range I don't recognize, so maybe their product is still around (or is fully functional, but only within Google Docs or something).
You're also ignoring the fact that many acquisitions wouldn't have survived without being acquired and their products would have shut down (or "pivoted" until they were unrecognizable). Tesla obviously wasn't in that category, but that actually makes it harder to compare to historical data, as few companies really parallel it well.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...
Presumably you mean if it's shut down it will be a great example, but right now it's actually a great example of the opposite: improving the products of the acquiring company while keeping the acquired product going. You could put up more walls between the two, but at some point that becomes just investing, not acquisition.
Put the Waze acquisition onto Tesla. Google buys Tesla just as the Model S is coming out, and starts using the technology to benefit their own products. Which products it would benefit I'm not sure, but maybe they improve the batteries for Android phones, or start using the Model S as the testbed for their self-driving cars, or something. Meanwhile the Model S stays as it was in 2013, with some minor improvements. This would be a terrible outcome!
I'm not arguing that a Tesla acquisition would have been better than the outcome we got, there's almost no way it would have been, but I would argue that that would be true for any company doing the acquiring. Acquisitions are just really tough for the identity of a product by their very nature.
Well then, we agree. I'm not saying, "Thank goodness Google didn't acquire them." I'm saying, "Thank goodness they weren't acquired" and it just happens to be in the context of a story about Google doing the acquiring.
I can't think of any company that could have acquired Tesla where the outcome would have been favorable for the things I personally want. There were rumors going around a while ago about Apple buying them, and my reaction was the same there.
It's not yet bad enough to say that they killed YouTube, but I'm afraid they might get there.
I also find that eight-year guarantee to be rather unimpressive. The Model 3 will be the true start of Tesla's game changing, and the deal was basically that Tesla could be broken up or killed once the Model 3 showed up.
This deal was only on the table because Tesla was in crisis. The moment they recovered, it went away. Clearly they thought that they could do better on their own than they could if they were part of Google, and I see no reason to disagree.
A. Musk has stated self-driving cars would be essentially finished by this summer, and only the laws and policies are lagging behind and keeping it from being fully released.
B. "How much more they could have been"? They're expanding at a ridiculous pace and are on-track to release a main-stream affordable car within a few years, something the established automakers have evidently been unable to do at all despite all their resources and established infrastructure.
C. "A better car"? What exactly are you comparing it to? Objectively the Model S has gotten the highest scores ever on nearly every single survey it's been part of. If you have a personal quibble with it, don't make out like that's the car's fault. If you're not happy with it "merely" being the best car on the market, I really don't know what you're looking for.
Even a few years would be pretty cool. I hope he's right!
Google seems like a particularly bad acquirer for this as well, since they have no relevant expertise, market position, interests, etc. They don't manufacture anything, they don't sell physical products, they don't even really sell nonphysical products other than ads.
Look at what happened with Motorola Mobility, for example. Google paid a ton of money for it, basically dicked around for a couple of years with it doing nothing of note, then vomited it back up again. Thankfully Motorola Mobility was not terribly remarkable to begin with so it wasn't a big loss.
Google fairly overtly bought it for the patent portfolio and had the plan to resell most of the rest from day one. The thing Google was buying was the patents, the rest of Motorola Mobility was packaging.
Contrast with Android, YouTube, or anything else where Google wasn't buying patents or doing an acquihire, but actually buying a company for a product.
(Google probably looks worse in some respect for products because it has the kind of reserves that let it spend money for big acquisitions when all it wants is an acquihire or some resource like Motorola's patent portfolio and doesn't have any plan or concern for the main product, but I think that's an indication that it is bad when it actually is buying for product.)
Motorola went from phones I would advise everyone to avoid to phones I actually advised family members to purchase in that time. They're basically the low cost nexus at this point.
I don't know how big a deal the self-driving cars thing is at Google, but a giant car/battery company sounds pretty complementary to that.
I'm pretty sure the opposite has also been seen [0]; what's the basis for concluding a Google acquisition would have put Tesla closer to the "never heard from again" side?
[0] Google's acquisition of Android, for instance.
Relevant: http://www.asymco.com/2015/02/23/the-entrants-guide-to-the-a...
Shit, a self-driving Tesla, now that is a car worth saving every penny for...
Don't get me wrong, autopilot is super cool and really useful. The autopilot features that are currently enabled in my Model S are wonderful, and I can't wait until they're all there. But they won't be even close to full self-driving. All it will do is maintain speed intelligently based on the car in front of you, automatically stay in your lane, and switch lanes on command. It won't switch lanes on its own, it won't stop at stoplights, it won't make turns for you, or do any of the hundred other really difficult (for computers) things that are part of everyday driving.