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Comment by jshowa3 | Hacker News Reader

Nobodies perfect. Not even Musk. So I suggest accepting both the faults and successes of the man as a complete package.

Tesla is one of the many cases of Silicon Valley syndrome where you run a company at negative profit forever while claiming to make all these substantial advances (some laudable, others stupid) in an attempt to disrupt something that's been working for decades for specific reasons. There's a reason car assembly lines aren't fully automated. There's a reason car companies don't allow customers to pre-order a vehicle. There's a reason dealership networks exist.

Musk isn't some fantastical genius with a solution to everything. Everyone before Musk was as smart and as talented, so his active refusal to really learn from anyone before him is what causes him so much headache. In fact, I'd argue that his contract with NASA probably saved SpaceX because that's one avenue where he didn't ignore a previously, well established business.

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It's not really one of those cases though. Electric cars were all but dead. They were considered a joke ("golf carts") until Telsa challenged the status quo and changed the industry. Many seem to have already forgotten this.

I have on my bookshelf a book from 20 years ago, which includes a feasibility study commissioned by a major auto company, that concluded that mass market electric cars would not be economically feasible until around 2020, but after that would wipe out the existing ICE industry.

The public may have thought that electric cars were all but dead. But smart people knew that their time had not yet come.

Oh, and look! Excepting high end niches that Tesla figured out, and government subsidies, that timeline from 20 years ago looks to come true pretty much on schedule.

I admire Elon Musk. Without him, reusable rockets wouldn't have happened for many more years. But electric cars would have happened with or without him.

Tons of environmental consequences for mining lithium and cobalt that are swept under the rug, not to mention battery disposal costs, when talking about electric cars -- https://www.engineering.com/ElectronicsDesign/ElectronicsDes...

Electric cars were not all but dead. They've actually been quite prevalent, it was just done largely pre-WWW so you didn't see a lot of the hype. It also wasn't that feasible because of the lack of technology.

And since companies were actually trying to make money, and cars were becoming more fuel efficient, there wasn't the demand. In fact, there still isn't that high of a demand for electric cars these days.

I'm not discounting that Tesla made some innovations. But people make it out like Tesla radically changed the functionality of the electric car when it's still largely the same technology, just more advanced.

To give an example, the Nissan Leaf was out well before people even heard of Tesla, and that was one of the most popular and widely sold electric vehicles. At the time, Tesla only had the 100k Roadster.

Tesla was the first to show that electric cars could look good and be performant. Before this the prototypes were excessively aerodynamic and underpowered (probably because of range anxiety). Unfortunately for the environment good aerodynamics make for ugly cars.

I'd argue it was because of battery technology. There was a substantial advance at around 2004 by decreasing the diameter of lithium iron phosphate particles. This increased the capacity significantly of LIB's. Then you have a couple of years of commercialization, then you bring it to market at high cost, then manufacturing process improvements drive the cost lower.

Other improvements drive the capacity even higher through packaging innovations and possible manufacturing improvements as well.

I highly doubt it was due to range anxiety. Even the early Tesla roadster could, at most, go 200 miles. That's nothing on a gasoline engine.

The Nissan Leaf does not look that ugly. It looked like your standard hatchback for the time.

I’m arguing that Tesla ignored range anxiety and traded range for power and style. The other manufacturers weren’t willing to do it.

Batteries did improve but its not like Tesla had access to better batteries than GM (at least in their early days).

> Unfortunately for the environment good aerodynamics make for ugly cars.

1955; drag coefficient 0.36:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_DS

Since then we've come quite a bit further, the TM3 has 0.23, which is a substantial improvement but neither car looks ugly.

I think most North American consumers would consider it ugly (I do), but I haven't done a survey.

The Nissan Leaf was released 2 years before the first Tesla.

All the talented people that you mentioned were laughing when he proposed reusable rockets, and we all know how it ended.

Reusable rockets have existed for decades. The space shuttle program used reusable rockets. The DCX was a rocket that controlled similar to the falcon 9 in the 90's. The problem is, both programs were shelved in favor of cheaper, unmanned, probe vehicles.

No, the shuttle rockets where expendable. The only reusable part was the shuttle itself and every launch was very expensive compared to SpaceX. Do you have any source for the reusable rockets used in the space shuttle?

They were not expendable (although they could be). They were refurbished. However, because of splashdown, the damage from corrosion and the need to refurbish the rocket because it wasn't tanked, caused the cost to not be feasible.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

That’s revisionist nonsense.

Revisionist nonsense in what sense?

All I heard was comment of "SpaceX Steamroller" from industry insiders. The companies that could have invested in rocket reusability decided to sit by and do nothing. It's not like it's an impossible physical achievement either.

You think Musk was the first to propose reusable rockets?

I think that Musk was the first and the only one to propose, build and continuously operate reusable rockets capable of autonomously landing at a fraction of the price per launch of whatever existed before. And the only one that made possible a safe landing of three rockets in the same mission with Falcon Heavy. Do you have any proof that anyone else did the same before him?

>Do you have any proof that anyone else did the same before him?

That anyone proposed resuable rockets before Musk? Use Google. You're naive if you think otherwise.

>at a fraction of the price per launch of whatever existed before.

There's no evidence that these resuable rockets are a "fraction" of the cost to re-launch. In fact, the cost is likely the reason that no one else has done it; it doesn't make economic sense, not because it's impossible.

There's also a reason electric driving has been put off as long as it has.

Everything is done a certain way until it isn't but that historically is past the point of "about damn time" and "why'd take so long". Doing what is right and what is smart are often very different things — and I am not claiming Musk is doing either, but this certainly didn't convince me of the opposite.

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