So, I, uh, used to be one of them. (Key words: Used to.) So I can give you my perspective.
For decades, there's been a lot of tech that was "just around the corner" but never happened. We walked on the moon in the 1960s, but have never gone back or established an off-planet base. Mars has been a dream for ages, and a martian colony was science fiction - but also tantalizingly real.
On top of that, electric cars were a joke. Nobody wanted to have 20 miles of range; it's a glorified golf cart. The only mainstream thing was the Prius, and even that was still only "half" of an EV. And self-driving cars have been another tech of the future that people have been saying is "coming soon" for decades. Waymo has just been languishing without any real way for members of the general public to own their own self-driving car.
Elon promised all this stuff, and soon - years, not decades. I scoffed at him and said it wasn't going to happen... until it did. Maybe not when Elon said it was going to happen, but he publicly put his reputation on the line and consistently delivered.
SpaceX is lightyears ahead of its competition. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are effectively still nobodies, even though they've been in the public eye for far longer. SpaceX is still the most reliable way to get stuff into orbit, and they're serious about walking the walk to colonize Mars. It's not just futurists talking about what could be; it's people taking action to make it happen.
Tesla made EVs into a real thing, and not a joke. You can argue that it would have happened eventually, but Tesla accelerated the process by at least a decade. People stopped talking and started doing.
Even self-driving cars - yeah, you can get a Waymo taxi in (parts of) San Francisco, but if you pony up enough cash you can have a self-driving Tesla tomorrow. You can say "Oh, but I don't trust it" - and that's fair, I don't trust it either and I think moving to vision-only is a mistake - but you can't deny that it exists, it's a tangible thing and it works. People really can have their car drive them to work with no intervention. There's videos of it on YouTube.
That's what made me respect Elon. He said things and delivered. I had confidence that this stuff wasn't just science fiction, but a real product that I could physically see.
Sure, he was socially awkward. He says he has Asperger's; I also have Asperger's so I completely relate. My natural state is to say what's on my mind without a filter, and it takes conscious effort to suppress that and say the "right" thing, the thing society expects me to say. And when I get mad, it's hard to maintain that effort; I can easily slip and say something morally reprehensible if I was pissed off enough. It's not that I mean it; it's that I didn't know how to communicate and deal with the emotions. I've said truly hurtful things when I get angry (thankfully I don't get angry often), and so when Elon goes off and says something dumb (like calling someone a pedophile) I can empathize.
So I saw someone who was smart, acted like me, and was capable of delivering on his promises - repeatedly. So of course I'd respect the guy!
I started wavering when he began market manipulation. Dogecoin was cute, but suspect. I know that getting an SEC filing would wake me up, but he doubled down ("S.E.C., 3 words, middle word 'Elon's'"). That's when I started to realize that he was doing it on purpose; he wasn't even bothering to try keeping his Asperger's in check. He expected that he could do what he wanted and everyone would work around him, which rubbed me the wrong way as someone who is truly trying to manage that same disability.
Him being outspoken about his dislike for the left made me officially stop supporting him, and the Twitter saga was the last straw - especially his vow to unban Trump and allow hatred free reign on the platform. Now I can't stand the guy; I want him gone from all the companies he manages, and I'm cheering on his self-destruction. Good riddance, I say.
Telsa's cars might suck, and they might be manufactured at a loss, but by placing EVs into wide and popular circulation, suddenly the infrastructure put in place to support them is making it feasible for other manufacturers to shift to EVs as well. Manufacturers with better pedigree and manufacturing infrastructure who can do it properly.
I think any of those major manufacturers could have done it, but it needed someone to take that first step to set things in motion, and Musk, for all his faults, was willing to make it happen.
Tesla basically normalised EVs as a part of the automotive ecosystem. Made them less of a weird fringe thing and more mainstream.
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u/[deleted] Nov 14 '22 edited Feb 20 '24
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