In an article in the Harvard Business Review, Patrick Vlaskovits has decided that the quote below, attributed to Henry Ford, was actually manufactured by one Jean-Marie Dru in 2002

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Often have I heard this quoted by those pedalling consulting services that will miraculously transform your employees into great innovators.

The consultant will generally float the idea that there are just two ways to innovate:

1. The dull way via customer feedback, or
2. Through true innovation that is created by gifted visionaries that mostly ignore customer input and instead create innovation based solely on their prophetic vision for the future.

Although why you’d sell this latter message to the masses is a mystery. Very few in the audience would believe that they are the next Steve Jobs, so this message might just act to discourage them.

There is a third option, not usually coached, and that is to copy the new and sexy ideas of others shortly after early market success.

In any case, the use of the supposed Ford quote is as silly as business consulting gets. Imagine for example that Henry did ask that question and the people did say ‘faster horses’.

Had Ford been a true innovator he simply would have done a root cause assessment which assumes that a customer doesn’t know what he or she doesn’t know. In which case ‘faster horses’ is translated to ‘a faster way to get to where I am going in or on my own autonomous mode of transport.’

And then the innovator would ask a bunch more questions as to how much this autonomous mode of transport could cost, and whether there are any other constraints or desires associated with it.

This process is then dove-tailed with an assessment of readily available and potentially available technologies.

Eventually a product development process starts, one that balances risks associated with technology, market and financial factors, as per circumstances.

The irony of the Ford quote is that Ford’s only true business innovation was to make just one model of car for almost two decades, the Model T; one that was very reliable, rugged, and most of all, cheap.

Ironically, his cars were amongst the slowest of the era.

After his initial inspiration to make cheap cars, his capacity for innovation was reserved for engineering which was focused on lowering costs, evermore.

For example, in 1914, a whole 6 years after production began, Ford famously changed the colour of the T-Model to black-only in order to save costs.

Cars had been around for 23 years before the Model T came along but they were still the preserve of the wealthy. The middle classes of America did not desire faster horses, just affordable cars.

What Ford actually did say was:

“I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be so low in price that no man will be unable to own one.”

Whether he figured this out on his own or by talking to droves of want-to-be car owners seems to be unrecorded.

In any case it was probably quite obvious at the time that everyone would own a car if only they could. Similarly we would all own private jets and luxury yachts if we could.

The real business challenge for Ford was the creation of a financed plan to achieve this goal, along with the development of all the required novel engineering.

Many, if not most business leaders could develop such a plan but very few would be willing to execute it because the risks of failure are very high. Most business leaders quite rationally prefer lower risk and lower return activities.

For every Henry Ford that is recorded in history there are thousands of similar characters that have been unsuccessful and are long forgotten. The bias in the narrative of the business media towards the adulation of past successful entrepreneurs doesn’t fool too many business leaders. They understand statistics thanks very much!

As a historical note, Ford’s company eventually lost market share because he failed to continually consult his customers as to what they wanted.

Hence he didn’t recognise that his customers had changed; as middle class wealth increased they had started to want genuine choice between models and list options in the cars that they purchased, whereas Ford had just the one standard cheap model with very limited options.

A century later Henry’s company is inflicting Ford Falcons on Sydney’s taxi customers. This doesn’t surprise me one bit; we asked for comfort and space, and Ford brought us rattles, vinyl seats, diff whine and three-quarter rear doors.

So, Jean-Marie Dru;

“If I had asked Sydney’s taxi customers what they wanted, they would have said teleportation.”

And they got Uber instead! You see, business innovation is a tricky, tricky thing.

Today I am at a business forum and the theme is, yet again, innovation in business.

Henry Ford even got misquoted! He is probably turning in his grave.

Speaker after speaker is telling this room full of business leaders that, in these fast changing and disintermediating times, they have to innovate or risk losing their businesses.

To these business leaders I would make one point; successful business innovation isn’t motivated by fear, it is motivated by excitement.

Or to put it another way, excitement is a necessary but not sufficient driver of successful business innovation.

The excitement is needed to motivate the innovator to happily and irrationally ignore the readily-perceivable and overly high risk factors, and probable failure.

So if you are considering some serious business innovation; if your motivation is fear, then don’t bother!

Some time back I wrote a paper outlining one hypothesis as to how the corporations in the Australian services sector could be encouraged by government intervention to require new sources of innovation as developed by a high-tech start-up sector.

In that paper I stated a view shared by many, that the world only needs one Silicon Valley.

The evidence? Firstly, Silicon Valley doesn’t just serve the USA, it is a magnet for entrepreneurs and risk capital from all over the world. Secondly, as Vivek Wadwha noted, “hundreds of regions all over the world [have] collectively spent tens of billions of dollars trying to build their versions of Silicon Valley. I don’t know of a single success.”

Recently I was included in an email conversation that included a small number of Australian high-tech start-up industry veterans. The group had taken it upon themselves to educate the incoming Australian federal Minister for Science (sic) on what is needed to ‘fix’ the local technology start-up sector.

The reason the email train existed at all is that we have never had a sparkling start-up high-tech sector in Australia. At times this sector has shown a little self-promoted promise with the odd moderate success, but that is all. Most people with the required expertise recognise this fact. One trip to Silicon Valley convinces them that over there they have something that we do not.

And yet our local media mostly runs high-tech sector story that are blazingly upbeat. I think this is because the high-tech sector stories are run as ‘feel good’ stories.

For example, a two man start-up might be promoted as the next unicorn and then it will quietly disappear never to be heard of again. Your local medical researcher doing some exploratory effort into determining the cause of Alzheimer’s will win a Eureka prize and the public may think there is a cure and a large Australian medical corporation on the way. It just about never happens.

The experts that can see past the positive media coverage seem to all have a pet hypothesis as to the root cause of the ‘problem’ that haunts the Australian high-tech start-up sector. Variably they will say, not enough skilled entrepreneurs, or not enough quality innovation, or not enough investment capital, or not enough qualified venture capitalists, and the list goes on.

Some of them then start promoting to the government their hypothesised solutions; for example (working through the example list above) creating university courses to up-skill entrepreneurs, or by government investing more into university R&D to create more innovation, or by removing barriers to crowd-funded venture funds, or by giving venture capital at friendly terms to Australian venture capitalists returning from Silicon Valley (and the list goes on).

There is a pattern here:

Firstly the experts announce that there is a problem, the lack of a vibrant tech sector in Australia without ever defining exactly what a vibrant tech sector would look like. To this I would note that it doesn’t make much sense to start looking for a solution to a problem until the problem has been properly defined.

Secondly, the experts propose a solution without ever realising that their idea is just a hypothesis. That is, it could be wrong and it needs to be stress-tested before being implemented. Since different people have different hypotheses you’d think they’d catch on. But no, everyone just thinks that everyone else is wrong.

Thirdly, most of the experts look at the problem in ‘kinetic’ terms. That is, they believe that the lack of vibrancy in the Australian tech sector is caused by certain missing or under-performing elements of a tech start-up food-chain (which comprises of innovation, entrepreneurs, skilled tech employees, risk capital, venture capital managers, investment bankers, corporate acquirers and a tech-friendly public stock markets). Fix the under-performing element they say, and then magically all would be OK despite the evidence to the contrary from past efforts over 35 years of government intervention.

I would assert that the problem is actually ‘thermodynamic’ in nature. By this I mean that there is no actual current need in our economy for a tech sector to exist.

The commodities sectors do not need one; they have their own R&D channels. The oligarchies in the services sector don’t need one; they buy their technology from overseas vendors. The educational exporters don’t need one; they only innovate to reduce costs and improve their marketing. And the list goes on.

Basically there is no major corporate sector in Australia that requires a steady stream of new platform technologies served up by start-ups. They are doing just fine as they are. Without this high level ‘driving force’ no amount of fiddling with the tech start-up food chain will do any good.

Until one of the Australian corporate sectors buys into the idea of buying start-ups and attacking global markets with the so-acquired platform technologies we will never have a thriving tech start-up environment.

To make matters worse, any start-ups that do succeed pretty quickly disappear overseas to serve larger markets with cheaper capital, thus leaving the local environment devoid of their potentially positive influence. This fact underlies the need for local corporate adoption of successful start-up technologies.

Just as a short historical segue, Silicon Valley was built on defence, semiconductor and computer technology companies in the post-war era. After decades of slow developments the VC sector really took off in the 90s (in terms of capital deployed) when three things occurred.

Firstly, the corporate sector in the USA saw Silicon Valley as a reliable and viable source of new platform technologies. The opportunity they saw was to cut much of their under-performing corporate R&D expenses and use those funds to acquire start-ups or listed tech companies; this turned out to be a more cost-efficient way to innovate.

Secondly, Silicon Valley caught the first internet boom and saw an opportunity to seize a once-in-a-millennium IPO market for new global technology companies.

Finally, the 1978 ERISA amendments allowed US pension funds to “prudently” invest in early stage unlisted companies. Before then the VC industry was much smaller and limited by capital supply; these amendments had fixed this issue by the 90s.

As you might imagine, not much of this story aligns to anything we might conjure up in Australia. If we want to have a vibrant high-tech start-up sector then we need to come up with our own need to have one rather than attempt to copy and compete with Silicon Valley, because it won’t work; never has.

Now if we accept all that as gospel (and most of you won’t and good on you for your scepticism) then it seems to me that we have two choices:

1. To create a new export-orientated corporate sector from scratch that needs the technology platforms served up by local start-ups, or

2. Encourage one of our existing corporate sectors to start buying the technology platforms and to start exporting.

Which of these has the highest chance of success do you think?

For the former to succeed we would have to miraculously create both a new export-orientated corporate sector and a thriving start-up community. This takes me back to the 90s when many in the Australian start-up community used to look to Nokia as the template for success. ’Create enough start-ups’ they said ‘and you will eventually get a Nokia.’ Nokia they argued created a new technology-export sector for Finland and it also supported a local technology start-up community. Well after 35 years of trying we haven’t got a Nokia, and neither does Finland for that matter.

My money is on using government incentives to encourage our plumpish corporates in the services sector to morph from being domestic oligarchies that use third-party off the-shelf technology platforms to global vendors of disintermediating technology platforms in their own sector. They have the capital to execute this plan, if not the management or the culture. I never said it would be easy; I just think this is the higher probability approach of the myriad that I have heard proposed.

Prototype of the Black Box Flight Recorder Image care of The Conversation,

A couple of weeks back, on the occasion of my daughter’s impending birthday, I was wandering through Westfield Plaza in the city on a shopping expedition. Already dulled senseless by Zara, Seed, & Bardot Junior I was greatly relieved to find a Tesla Motors’ Model S on display right in the middle of the mall. I sent my daughter on her way to the next shop and told her where to find me when she was done.

Sitting in the Tesla I was immediately impressed with the user interface and classy interior of the car. So when asked by the marketing budgie if I wanted to book a test drive, I of course answered in the affirmative.

Now I don’t drive much these days. For years now I have been cycling to work and also in and around town for social occasions; one of the privileges of living near the CBD. Indeed I no longer own a car because at some point I realised that the true cost of car ownership was equivalent to 2-3 cab rides a day even given the exaggerated taxi fares that we have here in Australia.

The truth is that my decision to go car-less had nothing to do with cost and everything to do with the fact that driving around Sydney is just about the only activity which can make me lose my nut. It’s a combination of factors that gets under my skin; traffic that hardly moves, drivers that are stuck on 40 km/h because they can’t be arsed reading the speed limit signs, cameras and cops at every corner waiting for the next horrendous misdemeanour (oh, a whole 5 km/h over the speed limit, you evil person!), no available parking, and parking with ridiculously painful payment methods and prices.

To make matters worse I can recall a former era when driving was easily the most efficient form of transport in Sydney. I remember a time in my late teens when I drove from Pyrmont to Bondi for a surf without once stopping. Can you imagine?

The only cars that I get to drive these days are GoGets and rental cars when travelling for business. This allows me to experience many different types of cars. Add these experiences to a lifelong interest in both the business and technology of cars and you might say that I am somewhat of a trainspotter when it comes to matters automotive. Ironic this, given that I don’t own a car.

Anyone that has a passing interest in cars will have been reading about Tesla Motors for many years now. I had even seen their cars when they were first released in Silicon Valley; some venture capital colleagues had of course lined up to buy the first batch. But due to sheer chance, prior to my recent test drive, I have never before had an opportunity to drive one or even be a passenger in one.

And to be honest I just assumed that the Silicon Valley venture types were being wankers when they waxed lyrical about the things. Of course they would say nice things because Tesla Motors was a child of Silicon Valley and also because these guys always drink their own collective Kool Aid. It’s their number one job skill in fact. This, combined with the fact that Tesla Motors derives from the USA (more on this below) had caused me to file their cars in my TBD* folio (*most likely crap).

This confidence in matters automotive probably derives from the fact that I grew up in a car mad family. A Ford family to be exact, in an era when there was just three choices; Ford, Holden and Valiant (which was reserved for the eccentrics, the wogs and, unfortunately, me for my first car purchase). By way of example, the Bathurst car race was a religious event at our house. Starting early one October weekend morning it was the one day of the year when no other activity was allowed. The males of the family would be glued to the couch for the whole 500 miles. The same male collective would spend any car trip commenting on each and every car of note that passed our vision.

With this start in life it’s no surprise that I have a strong interest in cars. But another reason that cars appeal to me is that they combine my three professional interests – design, technology and business. In fact there is far more ’embedded’ technology per inch in a car than there is in any other product on the planet, including Intel’s CPUs. After 150 years of continual development and trillions of dollars of collective and cumulative global R&D it is possible today to buy a new car for as low as $12,000. But unlike many other products, cars have these two wonderful R&D constraints that appeal to the professional product developer in me – the cost restrictions inherent in high volume manufacturing, and design; both of which must be optimised within technology constraints in order for the product to be successful.

There was a time when the Americans led the world in car design and engineering. That sort of stopped somewhere in the 1950s when the insular American market got shanghaied by corporate types intent on selling flashy large dinosaurs for profit. The Germans and the Japanese saw the opportunity and developed much better cars for export, which they are still doing to this day.

The poor corporate management of the American automotive industry must have started believing that cars sell solely on price and size, or through a great big distribution channel and lots of marketing, whereas they really sell on brand perception, all-round performance and design. Customers generally have a budget and within that budget they will select the car that they perceive is the most desirable brand, has the most amenable user experience, and that also has the best design or the least objectionable design.

It’s hard enough to manage the design process for any type of consumer product development but for car makers to get it right the decision making process around design has to be supported by management that understands the importance of great design and can recognise it, but not try to run it. That sort of right brain thinking just doesn’t normally come with the left brain requirements required for climbing the corporate ladder of a large American automotive company.

For all of these reasons and for as long as I can remember American cars have pretty much been considered to be agricultural and not terribly desired by the sane. Over the last decade we have seen some American models making inroads back into the Australian market, especially Jeep with their range of SUVs. But even so there are not many souls who place American designed and made cars at the top of their shopping list.

If we were to be honest with ourselves, the American-owned Australian icons, the Falcon and the Commodore/Kingswood, were also built to a low cost point and always a couple of generations behind the latest technologies. Which is why the Japanese and Germans and, more lately, the Koreans have eaten their lunch; these guys have been importing better cars that offer much better value propositions. And the punters have voted with their feet. The Falcon is finally going to the great automotive cemetery in the sky and let’s hope the Commodore follows. I for one will rejoice when I get into my last smelly, rattly Falcon cab. Was there ever a car less suited to the task?

Oddly enough my brother is looking forward to the upcoming Australian release of the Ford Mustang, primarily because he used to watch Allan Moffett race one as a kid and has always had this dream of owning one. In 2015 one can finally buy a Mustang with some sort of multilink independent rear suspension, almost 35 years after Mercedes Benz introduced this technology in the 190E of the day. That’s how far behind the Americans are when it comes to matter automotive.

Intuitively I had placed Tesla Motors in the same bucket as their elder brethren at Ford, GM and Chrysler. That is, from a country incapable of great automotive design and execution. And certainly incapable of great automotive technology. How wrong was I?

I don’t know where to start in singing the praises of Tesla Motors. So I will start in the least obvious place – sales. Prices are advertised online. Option prices are listed. There are no hidden costs and you can order your car online. They own all of their own stores and don’t use distributors. When I was in my twenties I worked at a pub on Parramatta Road where all the car salesmen used to retire after a hard day’s fleecing. The stories they told are indelibly etched in my mind and as a result I have never bought a car in any sales yard, new or used. Tesla Motors seems to have caught onto this distaste and reengineered the customer experience into the 21st century. And all power to them for it.

Yet, and I should mention this, they still do trade-ins. Trade-in pricing is a form of what Douglas Adams called Bistromathics; essentially there is no logic to trade-in pricing and if you attempt to figure it out you will go mad. No matter what deal is being offered a customer always feels ripped off because of the obvious gap between private sales prices and the trade-in offer. My advice to any car company wishing to make it easy for customers to swap a used car (plus cash or debt) for a new car is to sell the used car on commission on behalf of the customer and only take a fixed percentage fee of the sales price. This way the customer would not feel so gamed.

At Tesla Motors’ sales headquarters in Sydney they have an example of the chassis and drivetrain of their cars. I took a photo for those of you that haven’t seen it before. The compactness of the skateboard-like guts of the Tesla is remarkable. No gearboxes and one or two tiny electric motors depending on how much power you want. The batteries are hidden under the passenger floor with all that weight down nice and low for good driving dynamics. With a chassis and drivetrain like this it’s pretty clear that Tesla Motors could put any vehicle they wanted on this skateboard, and indeed they are now floating around an SUV concept vehicle. As their development budget allows I would expect them to fill every vehicle category (and there are now dozens of sub-niches exemplified by BMW’s maddening collection of models).

And then there is the driver interface. I won’t carry on much here but a good analogy to make is that of Nokia Symbian (being your normal car) and the iPhone (Tesla Motors). The controls on this car are startling good and different to your normal experience. Just about everything is controlled through the enormous touch screen, apart from the steering wheel controls and the voice controls, neither of which I played with. Even the rear view mirrors are effectively redundant because of the fantastically large and clear rear-view camera display. The Google maps display is so big that it is actually useful.

One feature I love is that you are always shown the current speed limit. This is useful for folks like me that don’t believe that our constitution includes a clause making the reading of every sign a compulsory activity.

I asked if I could use that speed limit information to set a speed governing function so that I would never incur a speeding fine. Apparently not as yet. But my sales guys suggested that this might come in a future over-the-air software upgrade. And this is one of the technical features of the Tesla you have to get comfortable with; there’s a lot of software between you and the road. Some part of me still prefers old-school direct mechanical systems which are not susceptible to being fatally screwed by bugs. However all Tesla Motors has done is go to the endpoint on day one whereas most other car makers are still using hybrid mechanical and software controlled features. Let’s just hope that their software testing is sufficiently high-class or that someone else finds the terminal bugs.

The car has lane identification technology and smart cruise control which slows the car down when there is a slower car ahead in the lane. Apparently these features combined allow you to take your hands off the steering wheel whilst cruising down the Hume Highway. I can assure you this is one feature that I would never test. But I can imagine Gen Y’s giving it a go; they seem to trust that the world is the very safe place that it is advertised to be. And it would give them more time for social media.

The Tesla has gas shocks that can be raised to go over steep kerbs. In my last car (a certain German thingy) I was forever scraping the front plastic and ended up simply not driving places where I thought I might do further damage. In the Tesla, once you have raised the car at a certain position this is recorded by GPS and the car always raises itself when you get the near the same spot. Simple really, and it is little features like that which makes this such a special car.

And how does it drive? Smoothly and quietly and with plenty of grunt. Way too much grunt in fact unless you live in the Northern Territory (where the idea of an electric car would be beyond silly). While I am on the subject, open speed limits were abolished by the Northern Territory Government in 2006 and replaced by a maximum limit of 130 km/h. More people died on Territory roads (307) in the six years after the change than in the six years before (292) when speed limits were not restricted. Seriously folks, driving down the Hume Highway at 110 km/h is a recipe for boredom and inattention unless you can take your hands of the wheel and have a snooze.

Despite that fact that we live in a Nanny State (that term is a bit harsh on Nannies me-thinks; it’s more like the Mum & Dad State) where any speed over 110 km/h is considered to lead to instant death, most car folks can’t help themselves. They like the idea of a car that can get to 100 km/h in 3 seconds and has a top speed of 250 km/h. This desire comes from the same part of the brain that lusts after a diving watch that can go down to 1000 feet and survive inter-stellar radiation; that is, the part of the neocortex that drives one to have more money than sense and a leaning towards caring about the perceptions of oneself by like-minded insecure folks. On such psychologies are all luxury products sold.

The biggest part of the sales pitch was of course ‘range’. Unlike a hydrocarbon-powered car this thing takes hours to recharge, subject to the specifications of the source of power. Tesla Motors has DC charging stations which they are rolling out up and down the East Coast. But even these only provide 270 km of range for half an hour’s worth of charging. The home charger they provide will give you less than a 100 km for each hour of charging. So realistically the use of Tesla’s cars is limited to round trips of less than the maximum range of somewhere between 300-500 km (subject to how hard the car is driven), or a one way trip of the same distance with an overnight stop. The primary reason that this car is selling though is that the people that buy it only use it for city commuting.

Tesla Motors do make a point of saying that electricity is much cheaper than fuel. True as that is, you could buy a fleet of Suzuki Alto hatchbacks and run them on petrol and still have money in your pocket compared to purchasing a single Tesla. The people that buy these things aren’t going to be swayed by the cost savings, if you know what I mean.

However, the price of Tesla Motors’ cars is on par or even cheaper than similar quality sports sedans. Product positioning at the luxury end of the market is really subjective and the truth is that pricing is a matter of what a car maker can get away with and still hit target volumes or revenue figures. And that is entirely down to marketing and brand perception.

To my eye, Tesla Motors’ cars look as good as the best of them with a design aesthetic shared with the Jaguar XF, the Aston Martin Rapide, the Porsche Panamera and many other four door sports cars that can do 250 km/h (if only they weren’t registered in Australia). That’s not surprising because the design constraints are exactly the same; safety, low coefficient of drag, four people, sports car etc. My favourite design feature on the Tesla is the exterior door handles that retract when in motion. Another is the charging cap which is hidden behind the tail light; thus there is no ugly filler cap ruining the rear quarter of the car’s design. This thing is very well designed.

Tesla Motors’ cars come with the added benefit of ‘green’ social credits. On my test drive we were forced to wind down the window by an elderly Chinese-Australian gent in a Toyota hybrid. He wanted to know if the Tesla was electric and, once confirmed, he gave us a very cheery thumbs up. Case closed apparently.

But beware the noddy-level thinking of the masses; a careful analysis of the carbon footprint of Tesla’s cars, which takes into account all the carbon impacts made during the manufacturing of the car and its components, and spread out over the likely useful service life, shows that the Tesla is pretty much on par with most other cars with respect to carbon footprint. This uncomfortable truth is probably a little complex and won’t deter the buying public. One other green benefit of the electric car is that there is no pollution generated at the point of driving. The pollution is all back at the electricity generator and that is good for our city lungs. Indeed Tesla Motors is now promoting a solar charging system to even further improve their green credentials.

Another ‘social’ selling point of Tesla Motors was Elon Musk’s recent announcement that ‘Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.’ This well publicised act got the chattering classes all excited about the generosity of spirit at Tesla. In this context, a couple of conferences back I was chatting to the global head of Intellectual Property at Hyundai who explained to me that, although car companies have zillion of patents, they don’t enforce them against each other. Given this lack of enforcement, when pressed as to why they have patents at all, he answered that (and this is paraphrasing) it’s a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) strategy just in case anyone breaks the unwritten rules of the club. In addition the patents work to document their ‘prior art’ in the instance that a small company or a patent troll goes after them; this documented prior art can be used to invalidate many patents. If Tesla Motors ever decided to attempt to enforce their patents against the big guys they would very likely find themselves the subject of a shit-storm of patent enforcement cases. So the so-called generosity of Tesla Motors in this regards shouldn’t be taken too seriously by all you consumers.

In summary, there are many, many reasons why Australian car buyers should consider the cars from Tesla Motors. My suspicion is that they will be quite successful in Australia. I am sure they will also slowly and surely improve the driving range and decrease the charging times, thus attracting more customers. The platform may be licensed to other brands and we may see more reasonably priced electric cars running around with Tesla’s technology. Of course the incumbent auto-makers also have hybrid and electric cars in their portfolio but I can’t help but think that they are too wedded to their hydrocarbon past to put the effort needed into the electric car infrastructure. Tesla Motors is the automaker that is currently installing charger stations between Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. They have to – it’s their only business. And for this reason alone I suspect they will stay ahead in the race towards electric cars.

Back to the USA. They do say that the darkest day is just before dawn. As the incumbent US automakers became more and more morbid an opportunity for change emerged. Combined with the rare opportunity of a complete platform technology shift from liquid fuel to electricity, this has enabled a Silicon Valley technology company to jump into this high-tech commodity business (which is surely one of the biggest challenges in all of the business world). They have shown just how good that Americans can be when their best minds and access to excessive risk capital can be combined with serious intent to disintermediate a very old-school industry. All power to them too; we in Australia cannot but admire from afar.

And finally, would I buy a car from Tesla Motors? No, but only because I don’t want a car. Having said that if a gun was put to my head and budget wasn’t an issue the Tesla would be first pick, hands down. It’s that good.