What makes Tesla’s car the unbeatable Lion King in the jungle?
Back in 2010, Toyota invested $50M in Tesla stocks (1.43% ownership of Tesla) and announced partnership to co-produce electric vehicles like the electric company SUV RAV4, what did they learn from the investment/partnership other than a 10x financial return(roughly $500M gain) by selling all its holding in 2017? Seems no much.
During 2010–2017, market cap movement of these two companies:
- Tesla went up by 3,300% (from $1.5B to $50B)
- Toyota ONLY went up by 50% (from $125B to $189B)
- Btw, Ford stayed roughly flat (~$45B)
Didn’t Toyota see the potential of EV? Didn’t both companies try their best to overcome the cultural conflict?
In short, Tesla’s magic is from Elon Musk’s super hard-to-achieve mission to build a smart, connected high-performance, high-ROI, and beautiful EV car, and he made it reality!
- Smart: Auto-Pilot, Self-Driving, AutoPark, Smart Summon, Traffic Light detection…
- Connected: All Tesla has a built-in SIM card (from AT&T in US) which make it always connectable from your phone when you wanted — you can check how much the charge is done, where is your car, and if it’s driving by someone, the speed.
- High-Performance: Fast acceleration (even the single-motor Model 3’s CHILL mode!)
- High ROI: Close-to-zero maintenance cost, much lower fuel/energy cost, easier to find a better located parking spot comparing with non-EV cars.
- Beautiful: It’s the iPhone of the car! Super simple and elegant design makes it just super beautiful!
Basically, Elon replicated Apple’s vertical-integration model to car-making which is a close to impossible mission for a new startup to tackle.
In my view, one key differentiator sets Tesla 10year ahead of competition - its capability of OTA(Over-the-air) Software update, almost every smart phone user has experienced either you have an iPhone or an Android phone. As the newest car manufacturer, Tesla is STILL the ONLY one all over the world can do it now, and haven’t heard any other makers’ plan to start support OTA. My guess of the cause here is — Tesla builds its cars with a software centric design, while it’s so hard for all traditional car markers to switch from hardware-centric design. With OTA, every single Tesla car on the road is a future-proven smart machine.
And let’s recognize the complexity of the software Tesla has built and keeps evolving is enormous. So far Tesla has delivered a highly reliable software — for example, even the car rarely entered into “Black Screen” mode means the display/touchscreen is full black and not responding and need a software reboot, you still can drive the car without problems!
Conclusion: Tesla has proved to the world with it’s clear vision, super capability of integrating both cutting-edge software and hardware in a highly reliable way, the always improving/evolving thru OTA update, no compromise of the beauty and simplicity of the design, with all the known 800-pounds gorilla competitors like Toyota, GM, Volkswagen, Porsche in the jungle, Tesla is STILL the unbeatable Lion King for the foreseeable future!
