March 31, 2016
Tesla Motors must be one of the most explosive companies to ever grace the automotive market. Despite the fact that there are established players in the market that have been selling cars for decades now, their offerings cannot compete with the second car Tesla Motors ever designed, the Model S. In all fairness to the other automakers, they had a pretty good thing going for quite a while. After decades of ruthlessly competing with one another, making the most innovative car they possibly could, year in and year out, until they decided why bother. They thought: it is almost impossible to break into the automotive market as a startup outsider. Instead of all of us taking risks, spending millions of dollars designing something utterly unique, that could feasibly flop, (and cost us those same millions) and potentially allow an outsider in, we should just take it easy, and enjoy the spoils of brand recognition. So they started pushing out copious amounts of Crapollas. Some of you may be thinking, cars are constantly innovating, that sounds ludicrous. Consider this, before gasoline became the prevalent source of fuel, there were others. The Model T was supposed to run off of a hemp oil biodiesel, and before that, the most popular source of propulsion was not petroleum based. Tesla was by no means the first electric car. In fact, despite being more expensive, they were the most popular and coveted way to power an automobile. Electric cars took a back seat to gasoline during World War I, when the military industry pulled all engineers into the war effort. There was no way an electric engine could power an plane at that time. Not even Tesla himself could create an electric system that portable and potent, so they switched to internal combustion engines. Fast forward a few decades, do you really think that none of the automakers could have started work on an electric automobile? They were just afraid of failure. Take the Audi Duo. It was the first production spec modern hybrid, and it was awful. Innovative and unique, but impractical due to obscene weight problem. 10 years later, the first successful hybrid was released. Toyota however, had the luxury of being able to take a risk like that, they were literally the best selling brand in the market. If you think Ford, Honda, and/or General Motors could not have done the same you’re your rocker granny. Then came the Tesla Model S. It was so far beyond anything produced by any other company, that all the other automakers were forced out of the retrograde decade that they were living in. Fortunately, most automakers could cling to the comfort of knowing that the Model S was low volume and high class, they could still survive with their budget buggies. That is no longer the case. Today, at 8:30 pm, Tesla will be unveiling their high volume product, the highly anticipated Tesla Model 3. If it is proportionally as good as the its big brother the Model S, and the Gigawatt factory is made without a hitch, other automakers are in big trouble.