How Tesla is Reinventing the Car
I can’t ride a horse. And just like generations who relied on riding horses to get around, driving is a skill useful in no other application. And it’s going extinct. Let me double down on that.
Humans have no business driving vehicles. We, save for a few petrol heads, are not enamored with our cars, nor are we passionate about paying attention to everything around us while in traffic, pushing pedals, switching gears, signaling and turning a wheel. Not only that; we’re also dangerous. We love our phones more, we’re distracted, reaction times going many miles an hour are cut short…
So when Level 5 self driving cars (Level 5 full self-driving is when a car no longer needs human attention to drive anywhere. Essentially, the car can make decisions about how to drive from one location to another without any need for human intervention — Jeremy Johnson on Jun 2 2021 for Torque News) will arrive in the very near future, we’ll switch effortlessly and never look back.
My kids, unborn yet, won’t know how to drive. That’s how close this immediate Level 5 future is.
I’ll save you the gore of dissecting Waymo and Tesla’s FSD (Full Self Driving) technology, the sensors, the AI, the chips and all, for now. Let’s look instead at breadcrumbs of that future in another areas of the car.
Because, when it’s all said and done, cars rolling swiftly over our roads, unattended, commutes will stop being about manning the car to the destination, but about what we’ll be doing until we get there.
And herein lies the next trillion dollar business opportunity.
Rumors say Apple is building an electric car and while there’s no doubt in my mind that they are, they’re not into the business of building the fastest, longest range EV with a sleek design. No. They realized that cars of the near future are extensions of our livingroom and sofas, technology and entertainment products, not automotive ones. And Apple too want a piece of that pie, before the old players wake up from their automotive focus and compete.
Echoing Palm CEO Ed Colligan’s quip in 2006, around the launch of the original iPhone, “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”, the likes of BMW and VW have already lost this war that hasn’t even publicly started yet. PC guys already walked in.
Surely, there’s a quirk.
“Teslas are modern, sporty cars, but they still look like cars. The foundation of the Tesla difference is what’s underneath the sleek skin.
Because Tesla designers started with a clean slate, they were able to develop the car around its electric powertrain and battery. The Tesla difference is that all that technology, power and environmental friendliness — and a few things no other carmaker offers — comes in one package.” — Retrieved from “What Makes a Tesla Special?”, John O’Dell, Nasdaq, 2016
First, Tesla’s design philosophy is deeply grounded in pragmatism, despite what it might look like from the outside.
For example it’s ironic, but the automation in a Tesla factory has at times slowed production down. They strive to automate production just like they do with their robot cars. But their multitude of robots still couldn’t do some tasks humans could as well and as fast. They made adjustments, but they keep at it, expecting a fully automated production line in a not so distant future.
Now that the S 3 X Y lineup has slipped their electric cars under our collective skins, they decided to put their crosshairs on the next major milestone: the truck category, a sales leader in the USA.
In one of the largest car markets in the world, cars are going extinct. Trucks, the ultimate automotive fetish of the US buyer, are taking over.
So Tesla decided they would take a stab at it in 2019, with their announcement of the Cybertruck. Nothing looks like one, and the few competitors at the time (Rivian et al), don’t have the manufacturing scale and experience of Tesla to compete at scale just yet.
Since the Cybertruck’s announcement, Ford, GM and a few others also announced very compelling competitors, with great capability, range and technology packages.
While I’m sure all will be market successes, I don’t think any will own the market like Tesla will.
And it’s not going to be because it’s SF design lines, but by challenging things on what a car should do and how, starting with how it’s made.
Sure it looks like it was just pulled from a scene in Blade Runner, but it’s not like the best selling trucks in the USA have just stepped down from the cat walk of a haut couture show.
Taking a look at Toyota’s best selling truck model, the Tacoma, doesn’t particularly paint the category as one full of good looking vehicles.
In part, it may be because of the ultra-hard 30X cold-rolled stainless steel used in the construction of the frame.
“If there was something better, we’d use it. Help eliminate dents, damage and long-term corrosion with a smooth monochrome exoskeleton that puts the shell on the outside of the car and provides you and your passengers maximum protection”, say Tesla.
But that’s not it either. It’s the economies of scale at play here. SpaceX’s Starship rocket that will take men to the Moon and Mars in the upcoming years is made of the same steel alloys. Elon Musk also joked the Cybertruck could be converted to be a Mars rover for those missions, as statement that’s less of a pun than it seems. And of course the Cybertruck will come equipped with Tesla’s Autopilot function, even though that may struggle on Mars.
Unsure if the “Armored Glass” invention that made a spicy demo at the truck’s unveil, by shattering when hit with a steel ball the size of a baseball, came along after a need identified on the car glass filled streets of San Francisco — with its car break-in phenomenon, but Tesla’s design mindset is one of inquisitive nature. Look at everything we take for granted and debate why it’s the designed the way it is. Here’s another example.
Mary Anderson, American real estate developer, invented the windshield wiper in 1902 in Alabama. In 1964 Robert Kerns, American inventor, educator and engineer, invented the intermittent windshield wiper.
So for more than 100 years we’ve been removing rain drops from our obstructed driving vision by running rubber blades on our windshields. Spare a moment to think at how ridiculously archaic this sounds.
Tesla applied for an electromagnetic wiper design patent last year. The benefits of the advanced wiper are surely better visibility, reliability etc, but I wager its existence is to allow for better computer vision of the self driving cameras, by better coverage and effectiveness of the wiping action.
There’s other elements that, when scrutinized, leave us scratching our heads in disbelief. Rearview mirrors, are another. Rudimentary glass panels on aerodynamics-ruining fixtures on the side of our cars for us to know when we can pass (unless there’s somebody in the blind spot) remind us how many years innovation avoided cars. Tesla showcased their newer cars with side-mounted cameras to replace the mirrors, just like Audi and others did before them.
Maybe keys are ones that pulled ahead, as I’m still carrying bronze metal keys that I have to insert in a lock to enter my home in 2021, many years after cars were fitted with proximity sensors, auto unlocking as I walk to the car, keys in pocket.
Tesla naturally went all in, with NFC-enabled credit card size keys for friends or straight up opening through a mobile app via Bluetooth on the phone or smart watch.
But these are bits and gimmics.
“Consumers are used to the technologies they see in their smartphone, they see in their living room, but yet they go into their automobile and they have a flashback to 1988. They want the technology that they see in 2019 in their car,” — Wedbush Securities and Tesla analyst Dan Ives
Tesla’s interior, with a giant vertical screen in the Model S at launch may have been another reason to switch for the technology enthusiasts, but looking back, it seems it’s been forever in the company’s crosshairs.
Let me explain.
A Level 5 car, driving itself to our destination will allow us to focus on other things, from productivity to entertainment. And, while nobody has cracked it yet, else we’d seen Apple’s prototype already, Tesla are already toying, exploring and playing with the minimalist layout of a car devoid of a classic cockpit dashboard (rid with gages, screens, level needles, actuators, buttons, levers and such). Their Model 3 has all that information in less than 30% of the central mounted large infotainment screen fitted. The rest is room for distraction. Let’s take a look at that evolution.
All Teslas have a giant center screen. But Model 3, with its lower price, has removed the cockpit behind steering wheel, leaving the dash clean and minimalist, precluding of the car-stuff devoid future. Sure, that’s a computer and a screen less, so lesser manufacturing cost. Or you may think it’s a minimalist design flex taken too far, like a French Peugeot. But what a fantastic serendipity to prepare the most democratized Tesla model, and its occupants, for the future.
Same for the yoke that replaced the steering wheel on the Model S, also present on the Cybertruck and Roadster concepts. Many argue they’re just design changes for the sake of it. It’s also been debated these were designed with some to-be-discovered benefit to manual driving and plenty articles still debate that, totally missing the point. An inquisitive eye, however, sees it as a timely reduction of a control surface that’s going extinct.
And same for the shifter, no longer an actuator, as now the car itself determines if it should be in Drive or Reverse, depending of its surroundings, informed by the multiple sensors.
We have no visibility into what Tesla are building behind the scenes, but behind the insane 0–60 figures, extensive range and all, the latest Model S packs more than 10 teraflops of processing power today. To match what a 1 teraflops computer system can do in just one second, you’d have to perform one calculation every second for 31,688.77 years.
That’s power designed to enable its self driving capability, its multiple screens and hordes of in-car entertainment. It’s already online, has built in games, wireless controller capability for gaming from any seat, Netflix, YouTube and Spotify, tons of others.
It’s 2021 and the world no longer buys a car by how it handles, how short its breaking is, its MacPherson suspension or its engine displacement. It’s all the interior comfort creatures and tchotchkes. It’s why VW gladly sold its new ID.4 electric platform, a trade secret, to Ford to build their own electric cars on the same markets, as the competitive advantage no longer lies there.
Roadmaps in the automotive world are spread in four year spans. Whatever invention or improvement available today, i.e. solid state batteries, will be available in a car you can buy in four years from now at the earliest.
My students and I spent the last few academic years imagining what humans could do while being chauffeured around by our self driving cars of the near future. And whatever those activities may be, it’s not going to be driving.
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Dan Berte, as Director, IoT, works in innovation for world cybersecurity leader Bitdefender in Silicon Valley and is Tech & Innovation Associate Professor at the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest, Romania.
This thesis is extracted from the Product Innovation syllabus of the Online Business Administration Models master I teach at the Academy of Economic Sciences in Bucharest, Romania, where my students and I have been researching this development since 2019.
