"Let's make a bigger one" was a really great idea, but it's not really in the same league.
With the Model S you still have roads, parking, large upfront costs, a driver, and traffic. The only difference is fuel. Minor.
(I'm all for the Model S, but I think you're putting much too high a standard on "innovative".)
That's pretty disruptive if you're a music retailer.
Why on earth would you say that?
(Also everything the parent of that comment said. Plenty of places are horrible to use without a car even where the distances involved are easily walkable or cycleable. We increasingly tend to plan for cars first, people second which I personally would consider a dead end and rather short-sighted.)
Energy efficiency issues aside, cars provide something even more valuable: isolation and privacy from the disgusting and invasive sensory overload that is public transport.
Think about what happens if the car really catches on in China (somewhere that has a ton of vehicles and needs a more environmentally friendly solution).
I think you are significantly underestimating the removal of gasoline from the car equation.
There is a world out there which is willing to go to great lengths in order to maintain an oil supply, and a main use of oil is for transportation.
So how's life at RIM these days? You guys hiring?
I would say the iPhone changed the industry. The iPad also changed the industry. A toddler might not be able to use and iPhone but they sure can use an iPad. That is a game changer not just a bigger iPhone.
If I described Tesla the way you described and iPad, I would say "another electric car with better styling".
Tell that to all of the small businesses that have replaced their cash registers with iPads equipped with Square Register.
I know of plenty of companies that have bought one just to easily demo stuff or to be able to do stuff in the field that they wouldn't have done earlier.
The iPad came out to wide acclaim because they got it right and showed it was possible. So many nay sayers saying even 6 months after release that it wouldn't be popular, it was a tiny market. It's very easy to reinvent history but I remember the crunchpad/joojoo coming out before the iPad, and it got panned everywhere even though many of us wanted a big screen iPhone.
Let's make an electric car is on the same level of innovation as lets make a bigger iPhone. Both had already been thought of a decade before, both had already been tried before, both had already had failed entrants that made no money and it turns out they were actually both pretty large technical challenges to do it well enough that the consumers would actually buy the product.
I would say they were in exactly the same league.
And lets not forget that Apple had already single handedly created the portable computing market in the first place with the iPhone.
And that's exactly the point I'm trying to make, perhaps badly! Before the iPhone or the iPad people knew there was a market there. But they claimed it was tiny and not worth entering or putting serious R&D into. So you ended up with hobbyist/yuppie toys.
Say tomorrow someone unveils a 3D printer that does some essential household task and every house has one in 5 years time because you'd be crazy to not have an Initech Megamaker 3000! Were Initech the the first into the market? No! But they were the ones that turned it from a hobbyist thing into a real powerhouse multi-billion $$$ market. They single handedly grew the market by orders of magnitude, they saw the actual potential market.
Whatever comparatively miniscule market there was before the iPhone is a reminder of how easy it is to think too small. Just look at the Android preview before the iPhone came out! It was utterly rubbish. Google were thinking small.