Tesla Musk Founder Debate

Prior to Tesla, there was not really any mass market electric car and charging network. Seems revolutionary, since all the other manufacturers are following the lead to make their own electric cars now.

Electric vehicles were the first types of cars invented.Musk also bought into Tesla.So its not like he invented some kind of alien technology.It was always about having good enough marketing to permit 10 years of R&D to make the car actually attractive.

Yes, we all know Tesla was founded shortly before Musk invested. That doesn’t tell us anything about the design of the Roadster (or Musk’s other companies).I’m sure millions of people had the idea of building an electric car before Eberhardt and Tarpenning, but as the quote goes “ideas without execution don't matter; execution matters.”

Electric cars were a joke until Tesla showed up

Didn't Tesla start as an electric car maker?

Yes.Not to praise him too much but the Tesla he bought and the Tesla that exists today are 99.9% different. You have to have some major chops to take a small start up poking around with the Tesla Roadster concept and make it to factories on three continents producing 1,000,000 cars a year.I think Musk is a huge ass but also that Tesla really proved that EVs work and mainstream* people want them.

Even if they have lots of experience, they failed to see how that the market was going to have to seriously build evs. It took an 'idiot outsider' like Musk to push it as far as it can go. and now we know that separately from the business success of tesla that it's possible to make successful and interesting electric cars like teslas, but also other companies have interesting cars.

Market an electric luxury sedan first?Before Tesla, EV were seen as clunky, not very convenient and half baked conversion from already existing gas vehicles chassis. A few people were buying them because "hey, I'm saving the planet" (not really, this sweet electricity is still coming from fossil fuel).But Tesla made EV kind of sexy, partly due to Musk other adventures that made people dream, mainly SpaceX, but also because of the "sporty" feel of the Model S and th

It's impossible to say what would have happened in a different timeline, but Tesla made electric cars cool. Yes, there were EVs before, they were half-assed token efforts by the big automakers to pretend that they were trying. Tesla forced them to be competitive.

The guys who founded Tesla (not Musk) to produce an electric supercar were coming out of the era where the EV1 had been destroyed. While I don't know if they personally drove an EV1, they were definitely rubbing shoulders with people who were. Did the EV1 product influence their decision to commit fully to developing an electric supercar? We'll never know for sure, but the timing is highly suspect, and suggests that it did.