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Comment by bengale | Hacker News Reader

"They were behaving like Elon Musk. And we certainly don’t want more Elon Musks in the world."

I'm not a fan of his behaviour on Twitter, but the idea that the world does not want more Elon Musks seems insane to me.

Theyre not for me personally, but whatever you think about Teslas I don't see how you would not want a person who can build a new car company. Just look at other entrants like Rivian, it's so hard, and he managed to will that into existence.

The fact that I can then move onto SpaceX is unbelievable. He willed reusable rockets into existence and made it into a sustainable business. Starlink, just look at starlink. Where is Blue Origin?

Would we really not want more of that, even if it led to more nonsense on Twitter?

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The sheer volume of electric car startup companies shows that Elon Musk was in the right place at the right time. The reason there are a lot of EV startups is because the powertrain is simple. You don’t need an army of engine plants and parts suppliers to build an EV. That is the disruptive part about the EV, which has nothing to do with anything unique to Elon Musk.

Also, he didn’t found the company, he was just an investor. Investors are a dime a dozen and mostly aren’t dinguses on social media, he’s the exception.

It's as if everybody just forgot that the world was full of propaganda against electric cars (hey, hydrogen is the future!), regulation was heavily stopping any car startup, and the catch-22 problem of not being able to charge because nobody had electric cars existed.

Nobody was making a car startup on that scene.

It's been what, a decade and half? It's amazing how people forget.

A hydrogen pump just got installed in my county last month, actually.

> regulation was heavily stopping any car startup, and the catch-22 problem of not being able to charge because nobody had electric cars existed.

Now we have electric subsidies and replete charging stations, and we're not really any closer to democratizing the technology. I'll be real - the focus on scaling-up lithium-ion has been detrimental to the electric car industry, and set them back so far that hydrogen ignition might still win the lower-end market. Tesla put their pearls before their swine, and now it feels like they're paying the price.

Hydrogen powered cars are so full of problems that they won't happen anywhere.

Nowadays electric cars are a visible minority almost everywhere on the planet. People seriously discuss the charging infrastructure. And there are many companies seriously selling those cars, a few even specialized only on the electric power-train that have no model at all immediately moved by combustion (but AFAIK, only Tesla doesn't do hybrids).

Electric cars are here to stay. Tesla may have made some bad decisions, but they moved the entire political framework.

What I’m saying is that just because Tesla was the first doesn’t mean that they or someone else wouldn’t have done something similar without Elon Musk at the helm.

What changed is that batteries got cheap and more dense than they were. That change happened whether or not Tesla existed. China at the very least would still have a massive EV market without Tesla.

Insane is a bit of a strong word, no?

If Musk was a visionary he would have built trains, not cars.

> If Musk was a visionary he would have built trains, not cars.

Musk started SpaceX in 2002.

Maybe one of the Musks this person doesn't want would build trains. It's another huge undertaking.

Maybe, but imagine how large a rocket SpaceX would have to build to launch a train into orbit.

Maybe thats the true motivation for the starship?

> If Musk was a visionary he would have built trains, not cars

Cars are not going anywhere and train lines are incredibly hard to build [1]. You have to work with the world you have, not with a perfect green field dream.

[1] You need massive amounts of connected land, a lot of it in places where land is really expensive and people are not willing to sell to you easily. Additionally, you have building restrictions (not a lot of cities will let you bulldoze hundreds of homes for your train line) and - I can't stress this enough - all of this land needs to be connected, which makes avoiding problematic areas just so much harder.

We have trains, lots of them, all sorts, from 350kph intercity trains to flywheel powered ones the size of a bus. Some are driven and crewed by guards, some are driver only, some are fully automatic.

What could he bring to the world of trains?

When Musk got involved in Tesla, the idea of an electric car was laughable.

Cars was a better choice than trains on both environmental grounds and business grounds.

First, environment.

• Trains are somewhere from 1/2 to 1/4 the CO2 emissions per passenger over a given distance than are cars.

• For freight are nearly an order of magnitude less per ton over a given distance than trucks.

Second, business.

• Nobody buys sports trains.

Trains are expensive to build and expensive to buy. Almost nobody other than big companies and governments buys trains, and they buy them to do a job. Those buyers tend to be conservative buyers when it comes to technology. They want their new trains to be a lot like their old trains, with just incremental improvements.

With cars you can build a sports car, and people will put up with all kinds of problems as long as you nail the performance (acceleration, top speed, handling). Sports cars are playthings, not work things.

With a sports car you can try very different things and then take what works and use it to develop cars for the more widespread car market.

> Sports cars are playthings, not work things.

And accordingly, they shouldn't be allowed on the public highway; they should be restricted to private racetracks. There's no reason to allow cars that can cruise at 3x the speed limit to be driven among ordinary civilians.

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