Imagine Tesla didn’t exist, Steve Jurvetson told me. “What would the world look like? I have this sinking suspicion it wouldn’t look that different than 10 years ago. A bunch of hybrid cars. A bunch of noise about hydrogen vehicles. You know, I don’t think the world would look anything like today — where entire nations are saying, ‘We’re going to stop making gas cars.’ ”
The last thought is the really compelling one for me, what would the world look like if Elon Musk hadn't started SpaceX and Tesla?
I think about that a lot and what an encouragement it is that having an idea that many think crazy is actually an opportunity to be a catalyst for change...or broke.
Either way, its often worth a good shot, hence the need to try radically worthwhile stuff like space travel and transitioning to sustainable energy.
If I were betting it all on disrupting the nail polish industry I doubt I would have the commitment to see it through. Being committed to something that will change the outcomes for my children's children will naturally gather a lot more effort from me.
There are other space launch companies and other electric car companies. The time was ripe for both. SpaceX and (less clearly) Tesla have just been executing best and earlier than others.
Every car company is working on electrics, and they have been for quite a while. The limitations were battery technology and cost, and battery technology with laptops and cell phones made electric cars practical.
NASA was talking about fostering commercial space launch companies before SpaceX was founded, and the two of them have been in close cooperation (other commercial companies too of course). If SpaceX didn't exist, that strong partnership would have existed with a different company but would likely look similar.
There's a tendency to think that the world would be different without "revolutionary" people or companies, but usually what ends up happening is just being at the right place at the right time. Excellence is required to succeed, but take one specific revolutionary out of the picture and another would have taken their place.
Einstein is a great example of this. A brilliant man, no doubt, but he is famous for discovering things which were ripe for discovery. The pieces were all in place waiting for someone to put them together. Doing so, and before anyone else, was an accomplishment, but he wasn't unique in his ability to make things happen, he was just first. Like a marathon, somebody always finishes first but there are many others running behind them.
If I understand your argument it is that the current state of affairs would exist with or without the key individuals we call out in history, because the environment would have created those changes anyway, and the individuals named would simply be other individuals who happened to be the ones to catalyze the change.
If I have characterized your argument incorrectly please help me understand it better.
The reason I disagree with that argument, as I see it, is that it implies a sort of 'fate' or destiny aspect of change and advancement. Which would be like saying that exhaust fumes from a car will eventually convert into water and co2 even without the platinum catalyst. Too often I have seen organizations and fields which were stably stagnant until an individual or group created a sea change that was, in hindsight, pretty obvious but it had resisted being detected for years.
For example: the discovery of the structure and function of DNA was absolutely going to happen in the decade or so when it did happen. Somebody had to go and do it, but the environment of tools, techniques, and general motivation were all there making it possible.
You find all sorts of examples of people independently discovering things at the same time, and this isn't just coincidence. Maybe most famously is Leibniz vs Newton creating calculus. The pieces were all in place for the mathematical study of change. The outcome wasn't predestined, each man's creation was quite different in ways, but they accomplished something that was ready to be accomplished.
Whether it's physics or technology, nature abhors a vacuum. Unexploited niches get filled. Sometimes in significantly different directions, but very often the outcome is strongly influenced by the opportunity.
In biology, this is a bit like convergent evolution. The implementation details aren't predestined, but general solutions to environmental problems _are_. Eyes and legs are very useful things to have, and they're nearly ubiquitous.
With Tesla, the deal is that we know we're going to run out of oil, and pollution sucks. Developing an alternative has been a big talking point since the 90s, and there are a whole lot of players in the game. Lots of companies are making lots of attempts and have been trying many different technologies. Lithium batteries are winning the technology race, they developed because of other consumer electronics and the environment is best for them. It's just evolution. Many other companies are trying different things and the same thing, it's not driven by copying Tesla (the competition helps though) it's driven by the niche need for a solution expanding and becoming more and more possible.
The variables are implementation details (fuel cells? lithium batteries? something else?) and timing. There can be quite a lot of uncertainty with "how" and "when" but quite a lot less with "if".
You're making a lot of good points IMP but it's hard to get away from the fatalist undertone in everything you're saying.
I think we can all agree there is a time and place for certain technologies but I think those variables are a lot broader than you are giving them credit for.
I think that you are also not including the things that are invisible and could be improved on and yet do not because humanity doesn't see them. We talk about things in the present because we can see them but looking from now into the future is a lot harder than the opposite.
Fair enough, I can see your argument. However, I'm not persuaded.
Let's assume your hypothesis is correct, then given the population of practitioners for a given technological space, we should be able to find examples of catalyzing change in the technology space that was initiated by what would otherwise be an 'average' practitioner in that space right? Given that I would expect to be able to identify people that are considered 'average' by their peers prior to their making some large catalyzing change.
That is hard looking back as most biographers will call out all sorts of details that made someone special with the benefit of hindsight, but I'm looking for people more current who were considered 'ordinary' and yet they were the catalyst for a huge change.
Finding such examples would help me with your argument.
"I'm aware" as my daughter would say. However I'm not a fan of 'imbued with greatness' aspect, rather my thoughts are that there are a set of characteristics, which I believe are learned rather than inherited, that give someone a more likely role as a change agent.Further those people have to be in the right environment in order to activate their change, much like platinum does nothing at room temperature to long chain hydrocarbons.
It is not that exceptional people don't exist, quite the opposite in fact. There are many many exceptional people made exceptional both by circumstance and talent in different proportions.
The best illustration of this I think could be learned from studying the development of physics between ~1850 to 1950. It becomes more and more difficult to think that each step wasn't inevitable as you learn about the sheer number of exceptional people and catalyzing changes. Each set of questions led to a new breakthrough and each breakthrough led to a new set of questions. It's hard to imagine the whole web falling apart for the loss of a single person. It was a great network of people and accomplishments influencing each other both average and exceptional.
A key that might make the big picture difficult to see is focusing on biographies which by name are focused on individuals instead of systems of people.
Excellent. I think we completely agree that there are many exceptional people, and the more there are looking a problem, the more likely a new and exceptional insight/change will occur.
I also agree physics is a good example as it draws in many exceptional people and each provide pieces of the puzzles.
Using physics as a metaphor, I also believe that there is a sort of "activation energy" which grows, perhaps exponentially higher, the further away an idea is from the common set of ideas that are considered 'canon' in the space. So the idea that private companies can build rockets profitably without government subsidy is a 'small' distance away from the canon that without the government's help the "business" of building and launching rockets is a money losing proposition. And the idea that you could 'land' a rocket after launching it in some way was clearly identified as a workable, not necessarily practical, idea back in the 60's. And it was certainly considered in the DC-X days of the 80's and 90's. But the idea that someone was going to make a profitable business out of launching rockets and recovering the boosters by landing them, was an idea that few people in the industry really considered. It had very high 'activation energy'.
My hypothesis is that without an individual or group that has the necessary level of "activation energy" to get an idea from the pool of the possible to make it the new way to do things, those ideas do not happen even if there are people who recognize that they "could" happen.
When I look at the electric car market I see the General Motors EV-1 which was almost exactly the same idea of the Tesla but done with insufficient activation energy to convert the entire auto industry into that mode of thinking. So I ask what did Elon bring to the problem that the CEO of GM didn't? Why did Elon have the runway to prototype, build, redesign, build again, and then build again into a market changing car, when GM already had all the expertise in the world about building electric cars and the connections to do everything Elon did in probably 1/3 the time it took Tesla? Why didn't someone in GM pop out of the woodwork and make Electric cars happen? What was different?
GM has some of the worlds best vehicle designers and engineers. Some of whom left GM to go work at Tesla. I believe Elon was the catalyst, and had he not started what he did I don't think we would be driving GM Model S equivalents today. That is the difference in people who catalyze change and the elements of change being available in my opinion.
This discussion reminds me of the "Everything is a Remix" [1] documentary. We tend to look at the winners to explain history, even though in many cases multiple players were working on the same theories at the same time, and the likely outcome would have been exactly the same if the winners have not existed.
I remember when it came out. Conceptually it is a remix of James Burke's Connections[1] which goes through all sorts of discoveries from their origins to their modern manifestations.
It is an essential element of this discussion that there are ideas that are brought up discarded, used, re-used, and remixed. But a more interesting question is not the origin of a particular idea, but how these implementations are "catalyzed" into the mainstream by different individuals. And much like chemical reactions where the components are already in abundance around the catalyst, the elements of these ideas are already floating around.
My hypothesis is that some individuals have a way of looking at the world and thinking which allows them to live in a world of many possibilities that are not currently possible. And, when given the opportunity, to pull the rest of us into there version of the universe with astonishing results.
The NY Times article reminded me of that when the question of what the world might look like today if Tesla hadn't been started was reminder of that sort of change.
I'm willing to bet that EVs would have arrived without Tesla due to better batteries, but I would not wager on reusable rockets without SpaceX. The culture of the conventional aerospace industry is hyper-conservative and would never have even attempted such a thing.
Of the two I consider SpaceX to be the more important and less replaceable company.
> culture of the conventional aerospace industry ... would never have even attempted such a thing
NASA had a very precise plan to create a commercial spaceflight industry in a similar way that it was instrumental in creating the commercial atmospheric flight industry in the 20th century. They want to get out of the business of launching things so it's less of a distraction from the doing things in space business.
Here are the goals from NASA's "2nd Generation Reusable Launch Vehicle" program:
* Investment in technology development and other activities needed to enable a full-scale development decision by 2006 and operations by early next decade of a space transportation system that will be safer, more reliable and less expensive than today's system.
* A coordinated approach that enables development of flexible, commercially-produced, reusable launch vehicles. This approach ensures that NASA unique hardware, developed by and for NASA unique missions-such as crew transport and planetary exploration-is compatible with commercial capabilities.
* Purchase of cargo re-supply services for the International Space Station - using commercial launch vehicles - to serve as backup for primary vehicles such as the U.S. Space Shuttle and international vehicles such as the Russian Progress rocket.
That's from April, 2002. SpaceX was founded May, 2002.
I don't doubt NASA's will or the connection between this and SpaceX. What I do doubt is that any of the conventional big aerospace contractors would ever have attempted anything like landing F9 first stages. They'd do a paper analysis, conclude it's either impossible or (by some twisted logic) not economical, and double down on disposable rockets.
I mean... they are still arguing that reusability is not economically viable. I get the sense that they didn't think it was going to work and now they're in shock and it's slowly sinking in just how far behind they are.
This might just be lacking knowledge of how the aerospace industry works. NASA wanted reusable commercial rockets, it got what it wanted. They create contracts to design things, contracts to develop demonstrators, contracts to fly blocks of missions.
It's not very likely for any aerospace contractor to turn down work because it's structured in a way that avoids risks. The NASA contract isn't for only the final results, they pay the R&D costs. The first round might be a competition to design a reusable launch system. You get paid for designing, it's NASA's ambition, you're just implementing it (and trying to implement it better than the other guy).
ULA might not have ever taken the initiative itself, but if NASA wants to pay them to design a flying pig, they'll be happy to do it.
This is how government programs work contracting to the public sector, the motivation for cheaper reusable launches has existed for a very long time. Reusability was a primary design motivation that led to the space shuttle. Lessons learned pointed in a different direction than a space plane for the next iterations and difficulties developing things in house led to the commercial motivation.
> Every car company is working on electrics, and they have been for quite a while. The limitations were battery technology and cost, and battery technology with laptops and cell phones made electric cars practical.
The business model of established auto manufacturers is threatened by replacing chemical engines with electric motors. Tesla's arrival is not merely "executing faster on the production of electric motor+battery design" because they also serve as a disruptor for the business model here. They are just selling cars.
Disclaimer up front: I work for a Tesla competitor.
Christensen's work after Innovator's Dilemma indicates that disruptive innovations include a new 'Core Technology' or 'Core Business Process'.
It is not yet clear that Tesla has either of those.
At present, Tesla is building and selling cars in a manner basically indistinguishable from competitors, excepting (so far) scale.
Some of Tesla's Tech (advanced automation) and Business Processes (especially the lack of dealerships, possibly their vertical integration) could be disruptive; we will have to wait and see if they can exploit these at scale.
As a comparison, look at Toyota in the 80's to the 00's. Through continuous improvement, they made their small, simple cars the best on the road. This could be thought of as disruptive; but then they went up-market to achieve better margins. As they did this, they became a lot more like their competitors. The competition started taking notice and adopted variations on the Toyota Production Method.
At this point, Toyota and their competitors (excepting Tesla) share basically all of the core technology and business processes.
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If you want to think about what Tesla will do in the future, and what advantages they have in the future, that's fine. Just realize that the future is another country.
It does seem like it, but it really only seems like it.
To be sure, the technologies used in the propulsion system of a battery electric vehicle are very different from the technologies of an internal combustion engine drive train; however the electric propulsion system is basically a straight replacement of the ICE drivetrain.
The vehicle still performs the same job, in basically the same way.
A new Core Technology would be self-driving cars, or a completely automated manufacturing plant - both things that Tesla may have in the future
It's a different set of parts, but it's the same sort of business. They're still manufacturing cars in much the same ways existing cars are manufactured and selling cars in much the same way existing cars are sold and people are using cars in much the same ways as existing cars are used.
The factory has a different set of machines and builds a different power train, but the fundamentals of the business are not any different.
There's a tendency to think that the world would be different without "revolutionary" people or companies, but usually what ends up happening is just being at the right place at the right time.
Usually what ends up happening? That comment would be credible if you have some kind of ability to re-run reality removing historically key players to see what would happen.
Personally, I've seen software development organizations flounder and some succeed dramatically despite their having similar equipment, availability of resources, snacks in the break room, etc. The difference all came down to a few key developers who drove things forward.
>NASA was talking about fostering commercial space launch companies before SpaceX was founded
Well right, except in that scenario "commercial space flight" was them continuing to hand dump trucks full of cash to ULA. Which wasn't really commercial in the sense we're all talking about commercial at all. It was a giant government contractor who essentially acts as an extension of the government who was interested in maximizing profit, not innovating. It looks, and would have looked, absolutely nothing like SpaceX. No signs indicate they're even ABLE to provide the same relationship.
Elon Musk did with Tesla what Steve Jobs did with the iPhone. Musk had long wanted to solve renewable transport, and Jobs had spent his life creating personal computing devices. Their insight was based on observing that the underlying technology required had reached a transformational level. It became feasible to do what they had already dreamed of doing.
Battery powered vehicles and fully featured pocket computers were inevitable due to the progress of technology. Musk and Jobs deserve a lot of credit for being the most responsible for birthing them, and for the revolutionary DNA they imparted.
Elon Musk did with Tesla what Steve Jobs did with the iPhone.
In a way, both Elon Musk and Steve Jobs seem warp the social consensus reality -- by being willing to see through it and substitute a harder first-principles reality for it.
Difficult to say, but one of the big factor for everyone saying they will stop to make gas cars was the Dieselgate.
The world may have decided to reluctantly drag itself to electric the "Nissan Leaf" way, leaving the rich people brags about their high power ice cars.
Tesla has made electric car looks cool, so sure the bulk of the electrification will come from uncool car like the Leaf or the Bolt, but Tesla made people dream of going electric. Thanks Elon, probably sped up electric adoption by a decade.
This is close to my view. I think electric vehicles would have started to get popular at some point anyway, because the battery technology is finally able to support a car that has practical power and range.
But Musk had a vision, and the money, and the motivation to show the world what an electric car could be, at a time when most people's concept of an electric car was something closer to a golf cart than a real automobile.
Speeding things up by a decade sounds about right to me.
I disagree about dieselgate though. Much ado about nothing. There just aren't enough diesel cars in the USA for it to really make a difference. GM destroyed the US consumer interest in diesel cars in the 1970s with their abysmal offerings.
From Europe, the dieselgate has had a lot of ripple effects.
Diesel is king in Europe and that crisis shook the public trust in the technology. So the various other numerous complain about the diesel suddenly became more visible. Diesel-bashing became fashionable and it has had a visible effect on diesel car sales. This drop in popularity lead to various city banning diesel (in the future).
The timing of it all makes me think that Germany saw the Dieselgate as the last drop marking the end of the golden age and rather than wait for the industry to figure it out, they decided to force them forward.
It's also possible that other companies with better ideas got squashed by Tesla because Tesla had more money. You never know. I am starting to think like that about the iPhone. In 2007 it was an innovation but now it's probably suppressing new ideas with its dominance.
What they have so far produced has been underwhelming with some unsuccessful forays into hydrogen.
Without Tesla's competition incenting them to compete, we'd be at least 10 years behind.
It reminds me of the stories of the half arsed efforts by American car MFGs to make compact gas economic cars during the 70s gas crisis. They could make them, did they give it a good effort? No, and it took them decades to reorient that ship.
Japanese companies are still largely unaware of this, with Mazda having their head in the sand about EVs and Toyota/Honda continuing to push fuel cells.
As one Tesla executive involved in its design told me, the goal here was not only to minimize the movement of materials like lithium and cobalt but also to shorten the path of every molecule that moves through the plant. “Because the further a molecule needs to travel,” he said, “the more cost gets added into it. We actually think of it in terms of molecular distance.”
It's things like these, where obvious truths are packaged as some sort of insight that really get my goat.
I was cutting wood with my kids the other day and showing them how you have to pick the wood up as little as possible so you could get more done with less effort.
No talk about molecules necessary - just don't do stuff you don't need to do. Sure it takes a lot of planning to achieve but its been a standard concept around getting the job done for, I would say, millennia...
"Don't move it twice" was a common saying when I had a summer job contracting. Don't move the wood off the truck, cut it in the bed of the truck, bring cut pieces in. Save all the dinky, random cuts for last, do them all in one go, instead of running back and forth to the truck every time. Clean from the top down, from the back to the front, so you don't have to clean something twice.
There's a lot of wisdom in the trades! I guess you care more for efficiency when it's your own energy you're spending, instead of some random computer's.
Seriously. The Toyota “lean” approach has been advocating for this - and reconfiguring factories around this - for decades. Hell, hospital execs have been taking tours of Toyota plants to import those ideas into HC for a good 20 years or more.
And they are still advocating lean manufacturing, and giving tours - indicating this approach is not the "obvious truths"
the OP indicates, even if the ideas are 20 years old.
Then why one giga-factory instead of thousands of small local ones? What would be the cost if all world’s yoghurt was made in a single giant factory? And you’d be moving milk between continents to get the yoghurt to the small shop at the corner? Now think about moving all these molecules again
Learned that bailing hay forty years ago. ‘course we didn’t use no book-learnin’ words like “molecular”, so I guess that’s why no one quoted us in the newspaper. Or maybe it was so friggin’ obvious that it wasn’t worth quoting.
As for Elon being one of the driving forces behind the transition to electric - Rock on Elon, nice damn job - as far as L5 AV - umm, you're so full of it you need to drag a septic tank - I'm just a little fella, and I do admire the primarily visual approach, but this all really boils down to 'You look, but you do not see' - I've been in an out of machine vision for a long time, and the one thing that's always been true is that we fail, and fail again, when we ignore the gigantic cognitive stack that is processing that visual data and making decisions based on it (and if we don't ignore it, we are forced to admit we can't handle it) . L1,L2, L3... yeah, sure, it's not that hard -I think 'Logan' got the freight trucks in 10 years spot on. L5 - I'll believe it when Elon and the Times author leave NYC for a late fall drive to check out a VT ski home, say about mid October - storm gone thru, cloudy/foggy night, poor visibility, and the only brains you got are in that car - better hope it knows that leaves get ripped down then and piled up in the twists and turns of backcountry VT roads - my guess is there will be a funeral, or it's gonna be a multi-day trip - the ability of a machine to go 'I have seen this before' has nothing at all to do with 'I understand what I am seeing and can draw rational inferences' My 2c, admittedly playing with midget systems, but the failure modes are pretty much the same
I think viable L5 somewhere in Arizona is different from L5 in New York, so autonomous vehicles will start spreading from places with good weather. But I don't think L5 is required for successful start of autonomous fleets. Advanced L4 with an option of remote 'driver' connecting for special cases driving (like car stuck or something), should be enough.
L5 is L5 - if the system can't tell, then it ain't L5 - and the driver 'connecting' won't work - it's basically 'please doze for three hours and then deal with a crisis within the blink of an eye' Pilots have enough trouble with this and they have 6DOF in a mostly isolated space - I do believe, but all my fun comes from learning about the spectacular levels of failure and hubris in much smaller systems :-) Think of it this way - if it's AZ, OK, I pick Flagstaff when the snows have just started to come and grease the road
Having been caught out in Tucson hailstorms with a 0% precipitation forecast, I'm not much impressed by "L5 for some regions, sometimes" myself.
L4, sure, map easy suburban spaces carefully and wake up your driver if things get weird. But L5 is intended to be human-parity, or at least have well-defined boundaries. It can give up and park until the snow stops, but if you're taking out the steering wheel it had better not stop more than humans do - and offer a "chance it anyway" button for if the snow isn't stopping.
Arizona is big, yes :)
But on average it has better weather conditions, let's take smaller Phoenix area, L5 there won't have to deal with snow (I know it can get small amounts of snow, but don't think it's a problem). Driving in Alaska or Tibet mountains is different feat than driving on good roads of Arizona or south of Spain. So I think L5 can start developing in those favorable areas first. But if it works in 99.99% of times, it's ok to have remote drivers for 0.01%, of course it's not for situations when "it started to rain, get in control while car is doing 100 km/h", but for situations when car is stationary and can't understand what to do and need human brain to help it for a short time. If this will let me to use autonomous taxi 10 years earlier, I'm ok with it.
I feel like the AV aspect distracts from the far more immediate EV aspect. AV disrupts more, in as much as it alters the dynamics of moving on roads. EV disrupts faster, as it displaces ICE. AV takes longer, has higher legislative barriers and is an almost unbounded problem (recognize all <x> which are a threat to your vehicle, recognize all <y> you are a threat to, from everything, all the time)
I think if the AV part had been cast more clearly into the future, we could have seen more energy and capital behind fixing the EV problems. For instane, we didn't get battery swap. Why? Its obviously the most immediate path to faster charge problems. Relying on future chemistry of batteries to make it possible to fix the charge time problem is praying for rain. Relying on altering out perceptions of what travel time is, by making the stop "fun" is yanking my chain. Making the batteries ephemeral and swapping them out would have made charge delay a non-problem.
EV alters more immediate problems. batteries are more immediately interesting. AV is being tackled in the mining industry and other restricted vehicle contexts.
The problem with battery swaps was that you're exchanging a big heavy $20,000 box with minimal assurance of its integrity. I'd rather wait for my battery to charge in 20 minutes rather than swap one for another, never knowing if I'm getting bad hardware in the process.
A recurring overlooked point of EVs: minimal exceptions aside, you begin every day with a full charge, and with 300+ mile batteries you're unlikely to run out most days. You almost never have to "fill up" like with gasoline; a 5 minute gas "recharge" every few days loses to never having to "recharge" at all (park for the night, plug in, charged by morning). In this context, swapping the entire battery seems distressing overkill. Trying to explain this paradigm shift to people who never drove EVs is...difficult.
I never realized what a pain the ass it is to drive a gas car until we got the Leaf, while keeping the gas car. It’s a first-world problem for sure, but having to go out of my way to “recharge” now seems so...primitive. As you say, it’s difficult to explain to the unwashed.
Oh, I get it. I know my driving is dominated by short run. But I also know that my desire for long run country driving is there. My key point wasn't to sell battery swap. It was to try and argue autonomous vehicle design should be decoupled from EV distribution.
That's why, for me, the Tesla Supercharging network was a complete game changer. I've gone on multiple multi-day trips that were enabled by the Supercharger. We got rid of our last ICE car more than a year ago.
Which exemplifies the barrier to long distance EV driving.
Taking you at your word, a vehicle capable of battery swap could also charge. It's not either-or. The value of the battery is mutable and would be less than $20k in an economy driven by swaps. But it would be a high value exchange. Bad batteries would have to be driven out of the system because lemons would kill it. It's more than a perception problem,you are right. What's the barrier to AV? Legislative and technology. Big problems, both with long-term high cost shape. Driving the market to EV+AV feels like a bad play. Feels like Newton driving to pass and handwriting recognition and that worked well for pads.. but not for Newton.
Imagine Tesla didn’t exist, Steve Jurvetson told me. “What would the world look like? I have this sinking suspicion it wouldn’t look that different than 10 years ago. A bunch of hybrid cars. A bunch of noise about hydrogen vehicles. You know, I don’t think the world would look anything like today — where entire nations are saying, ‘We’re going to stop making gas cars.’ ”
The last thought is the really compelling one for me, what would the world look like if Elon Musk hadn't started SpaceX and Tesla?
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