There’s an old adage about “the steady march of progress.” The truth, in fact, is that when it comes to technology and innovation, game-changing, massive leaps in progress are highly sporadic. Years or even decades can go by with just small, incremental gains before one key discovery or innovation comes along and unleashes a short, blinding torrent of progress. In the fields of medicine, the advent of technologies like antibiotics or genetic sequencing resulted in order of magnitude increases in knowledge and treatments, over very short periods of time. In the automotive world, it was 100 years ago that Henry Ford introduced the “modern” assembly line to automobile production, resulting in a groundswell shift in the importance and availability of the car to every human on the planet. In the ensuing 100 years, there have been many, many innovations in the automotive world, but none that so fundamentally changed the future arc of the automobile, in the same way. However, we might be on the verge of another such paradigm shift.
While cars have steadily evolved over the past 100 years, when you really boil it down, they are still fundamentally the same—four wheels support a compartment propelled by an internal combustion gas engine. Of course, today’s S-Class Mercedes-Benz is a technological marvel when compared to Benz’s turn of the century, single-cylinder-powered trike, but considering the strides made in other fields over the same time period, it is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Even the way we build and sell cars has been relatively unchanged for the past 50 years or more. Cars are built on an assembly line, and then only sold through an antiquated system of middlemen who cling to highly variable pricing structures, not unlike buying satchels of dates in a Bedouin bazaar. Then along came Tesla.
Now before you sit back in disgust and say, “Oh man, not another tree-hugger who drank the Kool-Aid,” let me state for the record that I have never been particularly fond of either electric cars or the electric car concept. Part of it is ingrained bias from a lifetime of addiction to internal combustion and part of it is not buying into the purported environmental savings when the broader picture of how that electricity is generated and how one disposes of these vehicles and their toxic batteries is taken into account. However, whether you like the Tesla or not, they may very well be poised to completely shift the automotive paradigm, in the same epochal way that Ford did 100 years ago.
First off, the Tesla Model S actually looks fantastic. And that is no small feat, considering nearly every other electric car ever produced has looked like either a golf cart or a freak show on wheels. The Model S is not only sexy, but it looks like a “real” car—one even a dyed-in-the-wool car guy would actually want to own and drive. The other amazing thing about the Tesla is its simplicity. Go to any Tesla showroom and you can view the underpinnings of the car with the bodywork stripped away. It’s almost elegant in how simple it is—a large metal platform (filed with 6,000 small batteries), with a large cylindrical electric motor unit at the back and a steering box up front. It’s so remarkably simple, it looks like anyone could have built it. And it is perhaps here where the potential revolution may start to grow.
Tesla has created a vehicle that is truly more electrical than mechanical. With the exception of the four corners, the majority of the car is solid state. To a greater or lesser extent Tesla has nearly made the vehicle more akin to an electronic device than an automobile. The way the car is built is that way, and the way the car is sold is that way too. In a major departure from the age-old system, Tesla sells their cars direct to consumers via storefronts, rather than via the Byzantine dealer network. Sure you may think, this is all very interesting, but not necessarily revolutionary in an Oh-my-god-you-just-blew-my-mind, sort of way. True. Where I think the mind-blowing comes in is when you consider the rumors of a lash-up between Tesla and Apple. What if this good looking, functionally viable vehicle were to be teamed up with the single most cash-rich ($160 billion) company that also had an unparalleled sales and marketing system that penetrated nearly every nook and cranny of the planet? Layered on top of that, who are the two largest consumers of batteries in the world? Apple and Tesla. What if these two powerhouses brought their collective technology and buying power to the single biggest cost issue on an electric vehicle—the batteries. So critical is this component that Tesla is in the process of building its own $5 billion battery factory, as we speak.
With all this in mind, imagine an automobile being as simply commoditized as a phone or a computer. For lack of a better analogy, what if the duo were able to offer the equivalent of an iCar? You select your color and options, place your order online and within 3-14 days, your vehicle is delivered to your doorstep.
By removing so much waste and layering in the system, and through the simplicity of the electric power train and the economy of scale of their collective battery production, the putative costs of a new vehicle would plummet, much in the same way that cell phones, digital cameras and computers did when they became mainstream “electronics.” When you then lay over the top of all that the very real prospect of these cars potentially driving themselves autonomously, then I think we may indeed be standing on the precipice of a brave new automotive world.
Now, would this new age of automobiles hold the same level of attraction and romance for us, as their internally combusted forebears? That is a very different question. I said we might be on the brink of a revolution…I didn’t say any of us would necessarily like it. After all, you don’t see many clubs and magazines devoted to vintage cell phones.
Casey Annis
Publisher/Editor
