A rainmaker that keeps the car industry on their toes
“I thank you for pioneering, for pulling us, for pushing us" said Herbert Diess, CEO of Volkswagen to Elon Musk last week. Rainmaker Tesla is keeping the car industry on their toes by creating a perfect storm in three stages.
Photo above: raindrops turned the UV-filtered roof fired up my Model 3 (Photo: Harold Verhagen).
STAGE 1: HISTORY 2003-2019
The recall General Motors' electric car in 2003 inspired the founders of Tesla to start building electric cars. One year later Elon Musk joined the company and today Tesla Inc. has more value than GM. Tesla's design and building spirit created four new factories since 2010 producing more than 800.000 cars. Although this is slightly 10% of what GM produced in 2018 it's the trend and the type of cars that makes the difference here. Tesla has produced almost one third of the 3 million electric cars currently on the globe. Driven by rising ambitions to meet climate goals Tesla's electric cars already saved 4 million metric tons of CO2 compared to their fossil fueled friends.
STAGE 2: AWARD IN 2019
2019 is the year that Tesla got the whole car industry on their toes. Every big carmaker now - from GM to Ford, from BMW to Volkswagen, from Nissan to Hyundai - is planning to electrify their full car portfolio. Meanwhile Tesla created more rain and thunderstorms with a mind-blowing list of 13 awards and achievements in just one year: best selling car, fastest car, safest car, car with highest resale value, most efficient electric car and best low carbon car.
STAGE 3: OUTLOOK 2020
One look at Tesla's future roadmap makes clear that they'll keep the car industry on their toes by pioneering with semi trucks and robo-taxis and pushing the industry's most attractive car segment - crossovers - with the new Model Y. While the big carmakers are trying to get back up, another cyclone is being made by Tesla: vertical integration. With their unique global network of superchargers cardrivers can make long road trips with electric cars through USA, Europe, China, Japan and Australia (still quite a hassle for competitive cars if not impossible). Also Tesla is further implementing vertical integration by making their own batteries on a very large scale in gigafactories and started to offer insurance to their customers. On November 21, 2019 the perfect storm has been initiated by Tesla with the unveil of the new Cyber truck that has the potential to shake-up America's most important car segment: the pick-up truck. Find new CYBRTRK updates here:
- Nov 21, 2019: watch the unveil of the new Cybertruck
- Nov 21, 2019: See how the windows did not crushed in the Tesla's testcenter
- Nov 21, 2019: Join the first ride with the Cybertruck
- Nov 23, 2019: After two days 146.000 Cybertrucks were pre-ordered worth $7.5 billion
See also my previous article with the Tesla Autopilot Global Quickscan 2019