2017 Will Be the Year Tesla Reigns Supreme–Or Ultimately Flops
2017 Will Be the Year Tesla Reigns Supreme–Or Eventually Flops
In its very first thirteen years of its existence, Tesla Motors made some of the world's thickest, best-known companies look stuffy as it charged electrical cars with lovemaking appeal, built a zealous fanbase, set records for spectacle and quality, and even made its cars drive themselves—all the while dodging bankruptcy and even flirting with illegality to keep up its frenetic tempo.
Not bad, but this is just the beginning. CEO Elon Musk has long promised to switch the world, with an affordable electrical car for the masses, one that happens to drive itself—and to make a profit doing it. That's the key to converting Tesla from a niche player into the company Musk says it can be, one making a palpable, positive influence on people's lives and the planet they share, while keeping shareholders blessed.
And two thousand seventeen is the year Tesla has to pull it off, or lose its superior position and risk being left behind as one more daring automotive startup that just could't drape.
Electrified Age
A Tesla-Inspired Truck Might Actually Make Hydrogen Power Happen
Chrysler’s Electrified Pacifica Minivan Is Legit. Wait–Why Are You Laughing
How GM Hit Tesla to the Very first True Mass-Market Electrical Car
Because behind those headline goals are the challenges in turning vaporware into a physical product at scale, that stage at which so many companies fail. And Tesla has to make that transformation while fighting off enhancing competition from mainstream and newer automakers, continuing to improve its autonomous technology, and avoiding negative press.
Yes, Musk—who also builds rockets , sells solar roofs, and advises Donald Trump on tech issues —seems to thrive on pressure. And hey, he has made it this far. But he also has a bad habit of letting deadlines slip and costs creep north. And that may not fly anymore.
Musk’s plan for Tesla has long been to begin by selling luxury cars (the Model S sedan and Model X SUV), then use the resulting revenue to fund the development of a car everyone can afford—the long-awaited Model three . At a beginning price of $35,000, it’s in mainstream territory. Selling millions of them is fundamental to Musk's purpose: popularizing sustainable transport and slowing climate switch.
For Tesla, the problem isn't creating a car that appeals to millions—the automaker took 400,000 pre-orders for the Model three within weeks after exposing a prototype. The problem is producing millions of cars, on time, up to quality standards, without losing money.
“Delivering a brand fresh electrical vehicle built from scrape is not an effortless task to accomplish,” says Raj Rajkumar, an accomplished in autonomous and electrified vehicles at Carnegie Mellon University. Tesla has pledged it will embark deliveries in late 2017, but Rajkumar says two thousand eighteen is more realistic. “They need to learn about volume production, and test fresh capabilities and functions.”
For context, Tesla threw everything at enlargening production in 2016, doubling annual production to about 100,000 cars. In April, Musk said he wants to produce half a million cars a year by 2020. Then in May, he said he'd get there by two thousand eighteen . It's an aggressive promise, given the degree of difficulty here. Enhancing production tenfold in the space of three years requests exquisite control of global supply chains. A delay in a single component, from a single supplier, could hobble production and profit targets.
Musk says he learned valuable lessons from the “production hell” of the Model X, the overly complicated SUV that reached market two years late. He says the design of the Model three is far simpler (no crazy falcon doors, for example), in a bid to slick the road to production. But that road still involves scaling up and streamlining work at its Fremont plant, and avoiding any quality issues that tend to come with quantity increases. It also has to keep rhythm by building out its proprietary service centers and already overcrowded supercharging network for all those fresh cars.
Tesla lost the race to build the affordable, long-range EV to General Motors, but the Model three and the Chevy Bolt serve different purposes. The Bolt is a halo car for GM, a sign of its capability to innovate—and a little fraction of its total output. “GM is a large company with global scale supply chain, and established manufacturing plants, but even then the Bolt will be sold at a loss,” says Rajkumar. Even then, it might be a victory. Tesla needs the Model three to be a financial success, because the puny sedan will be its bread and butter car, making up the large majority of its sales.
Maintaining a Lead in Self Driving
Electrical cars aren't fairly enough for Musk's outsized ambitions. In October, the CEO announced plans to make every Tesla capable of driving itself —not just on the highway, but everywhere, in all conditions.
So Tesla is already equipping all vehicles coming out of its factory with the hardware Musk believes they need to make that happen, and he has promised to send a car from Los Angeles to Fresh York by the end of 2017. “That’s undoubtedly doable,” says Jeffrey Miller, IEEE member and an autonomous vehicle engineer at USC. He says other companies have shown similar abilities, already, like Delphi, back in two thousand fifteen . The big difference is, Delphi's cross-country demo stuck to the highway, an effortless task compared to what Musk has in mind: door-to-door in total autonomy, including pulling down the passengers in Times Square, then parking itself.
Even if Tesla pulls it off, the voyage will be more a publicity stunt than a true demonstration of capability, says Rajkumar. Don't expect the Tesla you take home to suggest the same abilities right away. Still, showcasing off has its uses. “Because the automated vehicle market is going to be very large in the future, Tesla needs to proceed to be seen as a market leader.”
That means avoiding bad publicity as much as seeking good. “Right now Tesla has the luxury of a very educated consumer base,” says Tim Dawkins of SBD Automotive. “They’re early adopters and tech savvy enough to be willing to participate in betas.” When Tesla starts building mass market cars, and going after typical Honda or BMW buyers, that will switch. Those drivers will need to understand the limitation of their cars' technology, to avoid accidents.
To date, Tesla has been gung-ho with releasing “beta” versions of its technology, and using owners as testers. “I don’t see Tesla's attitude towards risks taking a backseat,” says Rajkumar. “I think the consumers are the ones who have to be cautious.”
Once Tesla sates its Model three pre-orders, it gets another problem: finding fresh buyers in an increasingly crowded space. Musk has built a serious fanbase, but as he seeks to expand past the impatient early adopters, he'll have to fend off old and fresh competitors. At the low end, there's Chevy, which began delivering the Bolt this month .
At the high end, which Tesla has predominated for years with its Model S and Model X, companies like Faraday Future , Lucid Motors, and Fisker are all building swift, sexy, electrified cars in the six-figure range. The conventional automakers are getting in on the act too. Mercedes, Audi, Porsche, VW, and Jaguar—to name a few—are building compelling electrified SUVs which promise to pull buyers from the Model X.
Despite the fan fever for the Model Trio, selling any electrified car to the general car buying public may be difficult. Carnegie Mellon researchers have found the masses haven't yet dropped their idea of EVs as dinky golf carts. “US consumers viewed electrical vehicles as $Ten,000 to $20,000 dollars lower in value than gasoline,” says Jeremy Michalek, director of the university's vehicle electrification group, one of the examine's authors. (In China, another significant market for electrics, consumers tend to view electrics as having added value.)
Early adopters might put up with the diminished range and long recharging times. Busy parents or business commuters, less likely—particularly while gas is so cheap. “If gas prices were to shoot up, that could persuade people to shift,” Michalek says. That's unlikely, and betting on the price of oil is not the soundest business strategy.
Meantime, another source of Tesla's income is under threat. Musk Motors makes a bundle in the US by selling the excess credits it earns for making zero-emission vehicles, to automakers with more gas-dependent offerings. Problem is, the incoming Trump administration may well be open to loosening EPA fuel efficiency standards, so those credits could be worth less—or worthless.
The challenges are daunting, and would keep a lesser CEO than Elon Musk up at night. He'll likely just pull his sleeping bag back out and nap near the Model three production line until everything meets his standards. It’s worth remembering that Tesla is but a teenager in the auto game, and has already achieved remarkable success, built an enviable brand, and created jobs in America. Things that one hundred year-old Detroit based auto companies are still working on perfecting.
Yes, two thousand seventeen is going to be critical, but to judge Tesla by its past spectacle, it’s has a strong chance of being a 'make' rather than a 'break' year.
2017 Will Be Tesla Motor – s Most Significant Year Yet, WIRED
2017 Will Be the Year Tesla Reigns Supreme–Or Ultimately Flops
2017 Will Be the Year Tesla Reigns Supreme–Or Ultimately Flops
In its very first thirteen years of its existence, Tesla Motors made some of the world's fattest, best-known companies look stuffy as it charged electrical cars with lovemaking appeal, built a zealous fanbase, set records for spectacle and quality, and even made its cars drive themselves—all the while dodging bankruptcy and even flirting with illegality to keep up its frenetic rhythm.
Not bad, but this is just the beginning. CEO Elon Musk has long promised to switch the world, with an affordable electrified car for the masses, one that happens to drive itself—and to make a profit doing it. That's the key to converting Tesla from a niche player into the company Musk says it can be, one making a palpable, positive influence on people's lives and the planet they share, while keeping shareholders glad.
And two thousand seventeen is the year Tesla has to pull it off, or lose its superior position and risk being left behind as one more daring automotive startup that just could't suspend.
Electrical Age
A Tesla-Inspired Truck Might Actually Make Hydrogen Power Happen
Chrysler’s Electrified Pacifica Minivan Is Legit. Wait–Why Are You Laughing
How GM Hammer Tesla to the Very first True Mass-Market Electrical Car
Because behind those headline goals are the challenges in turning vaporware into a physical product at scale, that stage at which so many companies fail. And Tesla has to make that transformation while fighting off enlargening competition from mainstream and newer automakers, continuing to improve its autonomous technology, and avoiding negative press.
Yes, Musk—who also builds rockets , sells solar roofs, and advises Donald Trump on tech issues —seems to thrive on pressure. And hey, he has made it this far. But he also has a bad habit of letting deadlines slip and costs creep north. And that may not fly anymore.
Musk’s plan for Tesla has long been to begin by selling luxury cars (the Model S sedan and Model X SUV), then use the resulting revenue to fund the development of a car everyone can afford—the long-awaited Model three . At a beginning price of $35,000, it’s in mainstream territory. Selling millions of them is fundamental to Musk's objective: popularizing sustainable transport and slowing climate switch.
For Tesla, the problem isn't creating a car that appeals to millions—the automaker took 400,000 pre-orders for the Model three within weeks after exposing a prototype. The problem is producing millions of cars, on time, up to quality standards, without losing money.
“Delivering a brand fresh electrified vehicle built from scrape is not an effortless task to accomplish,” says Raj Rajkumar, an accomplished in autonomous and electrical vehicles at Carnegie Mellon University. Tesla has pledged it will embark deliveries in late 2017, but Rajkumar says two thousand eighteen is more realistic. “They need to learn about volume production, and test fresh capabilities and functions.”
For context, Tesla threw everything at enlargening production in 2016, doubling annual production to about 100,000 cars. In April, Musk said he wants to produce half a million cars a year by 2020. Then in May, he said he'd get there by two thousand eighteen . It's an aggressive promise, given the degree of difficulty here. Enlargening production tenfold in the space of three years requests exquisite control of global supply chains. A delay in a single component, from a single supplier, could hobble production and profit targets.
Musk says he learned valuable lessons from the “production hell” of the Model X, the overly complicated SUV that reached market two years late. He says the design of the Model three is far simpler (no crazy falcon doors, for example), in a bid to slick the road to production. But that road still involves scaling up and streamlining work at its Fremont plant, and avoiding any quality issues that tend to come with quantity increases. It also has to keep rhythm by building out its proprietary service centers and already overcrowded supercharging network for all those fresh cars.
Tesla lost the race to build the affordable, long-range EV to General Motors, but the Model three and the Chevy Bolt serve different purposes. The Bolt is a halo car for GM, a sign of its capability to innovate—and a little fraction of its total output. “GM is a large company with global scale supply chain, and established manufacturing plants, but even then the Bolt will be sold at a loss,” says Rajkumar. Even then, it might be a victory. Tesla needs the Model three to be a financial success, because the puny sedan will be its bread and butter car, making up the large majority of its sales.
Maintaining a Lead in Self Driving
Electrical cars aren't fairly enough for Musk's outsized ambitions. In October, the CEO announced plans to make every Tesla capable of driving itself —not just on the highway, but everywhere, in all conditions.
So Tesla is already equipping all vehicles coming out of its factory with the hardware Musk believes they need to make that happen, and he has promised to send a car from Los Angeles to Fresh York by the end of 2017. “That’s undoubtedly doable,” says Jeffrey Miller, IEEE member and an autonomous vehicle engineer at USC. He says other companies have shown similar abilities, already, like Delphi, back in two thousand fifteen . The big difference is, Delphi's cross-country demo stuck to the highway, an effortless task compared to what Musk has in mind: door-to-door in utter autonomy, including ripping off the passengers in Times Square, then parking itself.
Even if Tesla pulls it off, the voyage will be more a publicity stunt than a true demonstration of capability, says Rajkumar. Don't expect the Tesla you take home to suggest the same abilities right away. Still, showcasing off has its uses. “Because the automated vehicle market is going to be very large in the future, Tesla needs to proceed to be seen as a market leader.”
That means avoiding bad publicity as much as seeking good. “Right now Tesla has the luxury of a very educated consumer base,” says Tim Dawkins of SBD Automotive. “They’re early adopters and tech savvy enough to be willing to participate in betas.” When Tesla starts building mass market cars, and going after typical Honda or BMW buyers, that will switch. Those drivers will need to understand the limitation of their cars' technology, to avoid accidents.
To date, Tesla has been gung-ho with releasing “beta” versions of its technology, and using owners as testers. “I don’t see Tesla's attitude towards risks taking a backseat,” says Rajkumar. “I think the consumers are the ones who have to be cautious.”
Once Tesla pleases its Model three pre-orders, it gets another problem: finding fresh buyers in an increasingly crowded space. Musk has built a serious fanbase, but as he seeks to expand past the antsy early adopters, he'll have to fend off old and fresh competitors. At the low end, there's Chevy, which embarked delivering the Bolt this month .
At the high end, which Tesla has predominated for years with its Model S and Model X, companies like Faraday Future , Lucid Motors, and Fisker are all building rapid, sexy, electrical cars in the six-figure range. The conventional automakers are getting in on the act too. Mercedes, Audi, Porsche, VW, and Jaguar—to name a few—are building compelling electrical SUVs which promise to pull buyers from the Model X.
Despite the fan fever for the Model Trio, selling any electrified car to the general car buying public may be difficult. Carnegie Mellon researchers have found the masses haven't yet dropped their idea of EVs as dinky golf carts. “US consumers viewed electrical vehicles as $Ten,000 to $20,000 dollars lower in value than gasoline,” says Jeremy Michalek, director of the university's vehicle electrification group, one of the investigate's authors. (In China, another significant market for electrics, consumers tend to view electrics as having added value.)
Early adopters might put up with the diminished range and long recharging times. Busy parents or business commuters, less likely—particularly while gas is so cheap. “If gas prices were to shoot up, that could persuade people to shift,” Michalek says. That's unlikely, and betting on the price of oil is not the soundest business strategy.
Meantime, another source of Tesla's income is under threat. Musk Motors makes a bundle in the US by selling the excess credits it earns for making zero-emission vehicles, to automakers with more gas-dependent offerings. Problem is, the incoming Trump administration may well be open to loosening EPA fuel efficiency standards, so those credits could be worth less—or worthless.
The challenges are daunting, and would keep a lesser CEO than Elon Musk up at night. He'll likely just pull his sleeping bag back out and nap near the Model three production line until everything meets his standards. It’s worth remembering that Tesla is but a teenager in the auto game, and has already achieved remarkable success, built an enviable brand, and created jobs in America. Things that one hundred year-old Detroit based auto companies are still working on perfecting.
Yes, two thousand seventeen is going to be critical, but to judge Tesla by its past spectacle, it’s has a strong chance of being a 'make' rather than a 'break' year.
2017 Will Be Tesla Motor – s Most Significant Year Yet, WIRED
2017 Will Be the Year Tesla Reigns Supreme–Or Ultimately Flops
2017 Will Be the Year Tesla Reigns Supreme–Or Ultimately Flops
In its very first thirteen years of its existence, Tesla Motors made some of the world's thickest, best-known companies look stuffy as it charged electrical cars with hookup appeal, built a zealous fanbase, set records for spectacle and quality, and even made its cars drive themselves—all the while dodging bankruptcy and even flirting with illegality to keep up its frenetic tempo.
Not bad, but this is just the beginning. CEO Elon Musk has long promised to switch the world, with an affordable electrified car for the masses, one that happens to drive itself—and to make a profit doing it. That's the key to converting Tesla from a niche player into the company Musk says it can be, one making a palpable, positive influence on people's lives and the planet they share, while keeping shareholders blessed.
And two thousand seventeen is the year Tesla has to pull it off, or lose its superior position and risk being left behind as one more daring automotive startup that just could't string up.
Electrical Age
A Tesla-Inspired Truck Might Actually Make Hydrogen Power Happen
Chrysler’s Electrified Pacifica Minivan Is Legit. Wait–Why Are You Laughing
How GM Strike Tesla to the Very first True Mass-Market Electrified Car
Because behind those headline goals are the challenges in turning vaporware into a physical product at scale, that stage at which so many companies fail. And Tesla has to make that transformation while fighting off enhancing competition from mainstream and newer automakers, continuing to improve its autonomous technology, and avoiding negative press.
Yes, Musk—who also builds rockets , sells solar roofs, and advises Donald Trump on tech issues —seems to thrive on pressure. And hey, he has made it this far. But he also has a bad habit of letting deadlines slip and costs creep north. And that may not fly anymore.
Musk’s plan for Tesla has long been to embark by selling luxury cars (the Model S sedan and Model X SUV), then use the resulting revenue to fund the development of a car everyone can afford—the long-awaited Model three . At a commencing price of $35,000, it’s in mainstream territory. Selling millions of them is fundamental to Musk's purpose: popularizing sustainable transport and slowing climate switch.
For Tesla, the problem isn't creating a car that appeals to millions—the automaker took 400,000 pre-orders for the Model three within weeks after exposing a prototype. The problem is producing millions of cars, on time, up to quality standards, without losing money.
“Delivering a brand fresh electrified vehicle built from scrape is not an effortless task to accomplish,” says Raj Rajkumar, an accomplished in autonomous and electrified vehicles at Carnegie Mellon University. Tesla has pledged it will embark deliveries in late 2017, but Rajkumar says two thousand eighteen is more realistic. “They need to learn about volume production, and test fresh capabilities and functions.”
For context, Tesla threw everything at enlargening production in 2016, doubling annual production to about 100,000 cars. In April, Musk said he wants to produce half a million cars a year by 2020. Then in May, he said he'd get there by two thousand eighteen . It's an aggressive promise, given the degree of difficulty here. Enlargening production tenfold in the space of three years requests exquisite control of global supply chains. A delay in a single component, from a single supplier, could hobble production and profit targets.
Musk says he learned valuable lessons from the “production hell” of the Model X, the overly complicated SUV that reached market two years late. He says the design of the Model three is far simpler (no crazy falcon doors, for example), in a bid to slick the road to production. But that road still involves scaling up and streamlining work at its Fremont plant, and avoiding any quality issues that tend to come with quantity increases. It also has to keep rhythm by building out its proprietary service centers and already overcrowded supercharging network for all those fresh cars.
Tesla lost the race to build the affordable, long-range EV to General Motors, but the Model three and the Chevy Bolt serve different purposes. The Bolt is a halo car for GM, a sign of its capability to innovate—and a little fraction of its total output. “GM is a large company with global scale supply chain, and established manufacturing plants, but even then the Bolt will be sold at a loss,” says Rajkumar. Even then, it might be a victory. Tesla needs the Model three to be a financial success, because the petite sedan will be its bread and butter car, making up the large majority of its sales.
Maintaining a Lead in Self Driving
Electrical cars aren't fairly enough for Musk's outsized ambitions. In October, the CEO announced plans to make every Tesla capable of driving itself —not just on the highway, but everywhere, in all conditions.
So Tesla is already equipping all vehicles coming out of its factory with the hardware Musk believes they need to make that happen, and he has promised to send a car from Los Angeles to Fresh York by the end of 2017. “That’s undoubtedly doable,” says Jeffrey Miller, IEEE member and an autonomous vehicle engineer at USC. He says other companies have shown similar abilities, already, like Delphi, back in two thousand fifteen . The big difference is, Delphi's cross-country demo stuck to the highway, an effortless task compared to what Musk has in mind: door-to-door in utter autonomy, including pulling down the passengers in Times Square, then parking itself.
Even if Tesla pulls it off, the voyage will be more a publicity stunt than a true demonstration of capability, says Rajkumar. Don't expect the Tesla you take home to suggest the same abilities right away. Still, displaying off has its uses. “Because the automated vehicle market is going to be very large in the future, Tesla needs to proceed to be seen as a market leader.”
That means avoiding bad publicity as much as seeking good. “Right now Tesla has the luxury of a very educated consumer base,” says Tim Dawkins of SBD Automotive. “They’re early adopters and tech savvy enough to be willing to participate in betas.” When Tesla starts building mass market cars, and going after typical Honda or BMW buyers, that will switch. Those drivers will need to understand the limitation of their cars' technology, to avoid accidents.
To date, Tesla has been gung-ho with releasing “beta” versions of its technology, and using owners as testers. “I don’t see Tesla's attitude towards risks taking a backseat,” says Rajkumar. “I think the consumers are the ones who have to be cautious.”
Once Tesla sates its Model three pre-orders, it gets another problem: finding fresh buyers in an increasingly crowded space. Musk has built a serious fanbase, but as he seeks to expand past the antsy early adopters, he'll have to fend off old and fresh competitors. At the low end, there's Chevy, which commenced delivering the Bolt this month .
At the high end, which Tesla has predominated for years with its Model S and Model X, companies like Faraday Future , Lucid Motors, and Fisker are all building swift, sexy, electrical cars in the six-figure range. The conventional automakers are getting in on the act too. Mercedes, Audi, Porsche, VW, and Jaguar—to name a few—are building compelling electrical SUVs which promise to pull buyers from the Model X.
Despite the fan fever for the Model Three, selling any electrical car to the general car buying public may be difficult. Carnegie Mellon researchers have found the masses haven't yet dropped their idea of EVs as dinky golf carts. “US consumers viewed electrical vehicles as $Ten,000 to $20,000 dollars lower in value than gasoline,” says Jeremy Michalek, director of the university's vehicle electrification group, one of the investigate's authors. (In China, another significant market for electrics, consumers tend to view electrics as having added value.)
Early adopters might put up with the diminished range and long recharging times. Busy parents or business commuters, less likely—particularly while gas is so cheap. “If gas prices were to shoot up, that could persuade people to shift,” Michalek says. That's unlikely, and betting on the price of oil is not the soundest business strategy.
Meantime, another source of Tesla's income is under threat. Musk Motors makes a bundle in the US by selling the excess credits it earns for making zero-emission vehicles, to automakers with more gas-dependent offerings. Problem is, the incoming Trump administration may well be open to calming EPA fuel efficiency standards, so those credits could be worth less—or worthless.
The challenges are daunting, and would keep a lesser CEO than Elon Musk up at night. He'll likely just pull his sleeping bag back out and nap near the Model three production line until everything meets his standards. It’s worth remembering that Tesla is but a teenager in the auto game, and has already achieved remarkable success, built an enviable brand, and created jobs in America. Things that one hundred year-old Detroit based auto companies are still working on perfecting.
Yes, two thousand seventeen is going to be critical, but to judge Tesla by its past spectacle, it’s has a strong chance of being a 'make' rather than a 'break' year.