… HE REDEFINES AMBITION

evolutionary technology doesn’t jibe with the vehicle industry’s business model, which is based on incremental improvements, slowly honing a proven product. Right now, I’m sure Porsche knows how much horsepower you’ll get in your 911 by 2026. There aren’t a lot of surprises, simply because the industry doesn’t need them. Slap on a new grille and add 15 horsepower and you’ve got something to sell, something that’s different enough for the neighbours to notice. Why get mired in moonshot R&D when America’s buying 17 million cars either way? That’s how the car business works. At least, that’s the way it worked before Tesla.

By now the Elon Musk origin story is well known, but a short recap: He sold his first software venture, Zip2, for enough cash to retire in style. He ploughed $12 million of that into what became Paypal, which was bought by ebay and put him in the nine-figure-net-worth (US$) club. Most of us would’ve taken that windfall and set off on a lifetime journey of maximum chillin’, with perhaps an occasional detour into public entrepreneurial dabbling. What nobody would do – and we know this for a fact, because nobody else has – is put their money and reputation and all waking hours into tackling the biggest problems facing humanity. Self-made wealthy people all have ambitions, but Musk’s are on a different level from everyone else’s. His Paypal chum, Peter Thiel, dreams of building a floating city where nobody cares if you jaywalk. Musk wants to colonise Mars and completely change the world transportation infrastructure. And he knows there will be colossal setbacks and non-stop smug punditry and platoons of People Who Know telling him that he shouldn’t bother. Why not just go hot-air ballooning with Richard Branson and call it a day?

Because he’s pulling it off, that’s why. Here we are, six years after the Tesla Model S debuted, and that car still has no competition. In about a year, the Porsche Taycan will become the first EV to directly challenge the Model S, and even Porsche isn’t promising it will get near the P100D’S 2.5-second zero-to-100 km/h time and over 500 km range. This is crazy, really. Porsche can’t simply blow this tiny American company off the map?

I get the impression that the Germans still don’t take Tesla seriously. A few years ago I was discussing the Model S with an executive from a German company, who dismissed it as a novelty. ‘The interior is horrible,’ he said. Last year, the Model S outsold the Mercedes-benz S-class in the US. And the Porsche Panamera. And the Audi A8. Combined. Are we taking Elon Musk seriously yet?

He invites you not to. He wanted his four-car model line-up to spell sexy. He pushes an over-theair holiday update that enabled his cars’ doors and lights to execute a choreographed performance to the Trans-siberian Orchestra’s ‘Wizards in Winter.’ He names his performance software ‘Ludicrous Mode’. He launches a damn car into space, with a mannequin jauntily hanging an arm out the window. And then there are the flamethrowers and miniature submarines and tunnels, and Twitter-as-internalmonologue trolling, all of it fuelling daily speculation about whether Elon Musk is good or bad, sane or crazy, genius or fool. Zoom out, people. We’re talking about a guy who thinks on a cosmic scale, who wants to push civilisation as far as he can while we still have one. But go ahead and scoff at what he said on the quarterly conference call.

No matter what happens from here on out, Tesla has changed the automotive industry’s timeline for progress. Incrementalism is out. From now on, it’s all Ludicrous Mode. – Ezra Dyer