Four innovations that set Tesla apart from the rest
How a California manufacturer of quirky roadsters changed the industry forever
Tesla delivered more than 245,000 electric cars and SUVs last year — nearly as many, claims Bloomberg, as the year before. More astonishingly, the company sold 146,000 Model 3s in 2018, making it the top-ranked entry level luxury sedan in the United States and the fifth bestselling four door overall. That feat is made all the more remarkable given that the rest of the top 10 are all far less expensive family sedans and econoboxes.
A cynic might contend Tesla’s biggest advantage remains the devotion of its flock to leader Elon Musk. And the fact a luxury sedan is the bestselling electric vehicle in North America might be a sign of a general weakness of the EV segment as a whole.
Take the Model 3 and California sales out of the equation and there’s not much of an electric revolution going on. But — and this can never be diminished — part of Tesla’s market-changing success has been the result of some bold engineering. Here, then, are the top four innovations that have turned an inconsequential California manufacturer of quirky little roadsters into the industry’s most emulated automaker.
The Supercharger network: It might seem obvious now, but when Elon Musk proposed building his own charging network, it was a huge gamble. Automakers have long eschewed taking any responsibility for their products other than manufacturing, leaving sales of their cars to franchisees and refuelling to completely independent conglomerates.
Other automakers decided to wait for government entities to build the requisite recharging infrastructure. Now that Tesla has, according to its own website, 11,583 Superchargers in 1,386 locations — mainly in North America, the Far East and Europe — the company’s lead over its competitors seems almost insurmountable. Battery technology: If the benefit of the Supercharger network seems obvious in hindsight, Tesla’s gamble on Panasonic batteries still seems more the benefit of luck than far-sighted engineering. Nonetheless, I must admit my original evaluation of Tesla’s use of double-A-sized batteries was a mistake.
Like virtually every car company, I thought that managing the 5,000 to 8,000 individual cells that make up a single Tesla battery would prove an insurmountable task.
Well, they, like I, have (so far) been wrong. Not only have Tesla’s smaller cells proven slightly more powerful — larger cells can’t be quite as power dense for fear of fire — but the company has proven to be amazingly adept at equalizing the power output of those thousands of cells. Over-the-air updates: Consumer Reports had initially denied the Model 3 its coveted “recommended” rating because the car’s stopping distance from 60 miles per hour (96 km/ h) was a subpar 152 feet (46.3 metres). With nothing more than a software fix, a retest saw the compact Tesla stop in 133 feet (40.5 metres), an improvement possible because so much of the braking system (ABS, regenerative braking, etc.) is now controlled electronically. Until recently, retroactive performance upgrades via software alone were unheard of.
Teslas can see motorcycles: A recent report from Motorcycle News that said the Model 3, running Version 9 software, can sense motorcycles “filtering ” between vehicles is a comfort, considering the No. 1 cause of car-versus-motorcycle collisions is the old “I didn’t see him” excuse.