Yeah, but the irony in all this is where would we be without Mr Musk atm ?
Not here on HC / AVZ that's for sure
Not talking about an EV anything most likely
Would we have ever heard of the mythical place called Manono
Would we even know about the "Monster in the Making" ( lurking there )
No, we'd all be none the wiser, knowing Sweet FA imo
Let alone any talk of a "Revolution" for another Decade or more
Without ever hearing of, let alone seeing a Giga-anything in my lifetime most likely
While We, the Planet Choked on ICE for a Lot longer than we can afford / need to
Also none of us would give a Shit about OT's or Finance etc or Hydro anything, let alone who's got the Biggest friggin' Sandpit in their backyard atm, as well as who's running around playing Cowboys & Indians in the main street
*So to Remind,
Tesla's strategy was to first enter the upper market segment, where customers are willing to pay more, and then drive down the market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model.
Now we see that in less than 20 years, the company has realized its goals and continues to move forward rapidly.
The company's ultimate goal is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy and, according to Musk (and common sense), there are only two limits to this: affordability and volume.
Tesla has revolutionized two of the largest industries in the world—energy and transportation.
But in order to completely transform them, manufacturers have to make a colossal number of battery cells, which is currently the limiting factor.
To speed up this process, they must reduce the cost of battery cells so that more people can afford them.
"The longer we take to transition to sustainable energy the greater the risk that we take.
So Tesla should really be measured by how many years we accelerate the advent of sustainable energy," Musk says.
During Battery Day, Tesla unveiled new 4680 tabless cells that, thanks to a number of major advances, will be 56% $/kWh cheaper than the ones the company is currently producing.
This is a dramatic breakthrough that will mark the beginning of a truly massive proliferation of EVs.
Moreover, the company not only theoretically can do it in the future, new cells are already in cars that have been on the roads for several months.
Tesla, by making amazing EVs people love, practically single-handedly pushed other automakers towards electrification much sooner than would have otherwise been possible.
This is a Herculean feat of which the company can already be very proud.
Yet even faster acceleration is needed.
The EV Revolution Has Been a Century in the Making
It feels like we're on the cusp of widespread electric vehicle acceptance, but this futuristic technology has been mainstream before.
Unless you've been hiding out in the grease pit of a long-bypassed service station for the past couple years, you've surely caught wind of at least some of the recent electric vehicle news.
Based on the variety of EVs on sale or headed to market in the coming year or two, let alone the torrent of vehicles announced by startup automakers of varying degrees of reputability and viability, you'd think we were on the cusp of a transportation revolution.
What this means for the future of internal combustion—whether its days are numbered or whether it will share space on the road with battery-electric vehicles indefinitely—remains uncertain.
All those caveats aside, however, it seems that for the first time, auto manufacturers are determined to produce a range of practical electric vehicles that at least a sizable portion of the car-buying public might actually want to own.
For the first time in a century, anyway.
Students of automotive history know that electric vehicles enjoyed a brief heyday at the dawn of the automotive age; from the turn of the 20th century until the early 1920s, offerings from the likes of Detroit Electric, Baker and Rauch & Lang competed favorably with gasoline and steam-powered vehicles—and absolutely dominated other powertrain options when it came to ease of use.
EV builders used their smooth, silent operation and lack of a dangerous crank start to market the cars toward wealthy women.
It's estimated that, by 1900, about one-third of the vehicles on American roads were electric. Given the market penetration for EVs today, that's a downright staggering figure—at least until you remember that there were far, far fewer cars on the road. Still, it seemed like it had a fighting chance against internal combustion and steam.
By the 1920s, however, the dream of mainstream electric automobility was more or less dead.
Internal combustion cemented its dominance, and we've been cruising along in that groove ever since.
If you're conspiratorially minded, this was all by design.
Two common theories I hear are that automakers themselves put the kibosh on EV tech (can't sell as many parts on account of the simpler powertrains, or something) or some sort of patent buying-and-burying effort on the part of oil companies and/or governments (wouldn't put it totally past them, but the economics of suppressing truly revolutionary technologies doesn't really check out).
It's all rather fuzzy and never quite seems to add up, but in any case, shadowy groups supposedly got together at some point to deny us our zero-emissions future.
In that light, every dragstrip victory by a Tesla Model S isn't just progress: It's revenge.
But you don't need some grand conspiracy to explain the electric car's lengthy dormancy.
It was the technological advancement of alternative technologies, rather than some theorized suppression of EV technology, that shoved battery-electric vehicles to the fringes for a century.
I don't think there was any more fundamentally direct path from there to here.
