Elon Musk delivers Model X electric sports-utility vehicles during a presentation in Freemont, Calif., on Sept. 29, 2015.Stephen Lam/Reuters
Gus Carlson is a New York-based columnist for The Globe and Mail.
As Tesla Inc.’s TSLA-NE Elon Musk wanders into ventures across a broadening spectrum – space travel, artificial intelligence, Twitter and tunnels in Texas – and weighs in on geopolitical events in Ukraine and Taiwan, the chorus of naysayers has grown.
While a lot of that criticism for Mr. Musk might be the personal, subjective sort, there are also some objective reasons for concern. Many of his detractors worry about Mr. Musk’s ability to focus. At about US$200 a share, Tesla is almost 50 per cent off its pandemic high, and the gap between his vision of an electric-car future and the reality of current infrastructure seems to be widening.
But as is often the case with innovators, the job of bridging that gap is not Mr. Musk’s alone – in the same way it was not Steve Jobs’ task to create a telecommunications infrastructure to support his data-sucking iPhone, or Henry Ford’s to create a network of roadways to enable wide adoption of his mass-produced motorcar. Innovators have always been at the mercy of mere mortals and the earthbound hurdles they fear aren’t conquerable.
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In Mr. Musk’s case, it might be time for the Chicken Littles to stop clucking about his focus and pay attention to the myriad non-Musk roadblocks that need to be cleared for his vision to succeed. That’s especially critical as tight-deadline EV mandates are being set in places like California: In August, regulators said all new vehicles sold in the state by 2035 needed to be electric or plug-in hybrids.
That’s a steep hill to climb. California’s existing grid is a mess, with regular outages that limit when EV owners can charge up. Nationwide, efforts to create a network of convenient and reliable charging stations has been slow and fragmented and continue to limit the distance range of EVs. Meanwhile, long lines at charging stations test the patience of drivers.
Then there is the cost. The average price of a new EV in the U.S. is nearly US$67,000. That’s about US$20,000 higher than the average car price. Closing that gap will be critical to meet deadlines like the one in California, and will likely require subsidies.
And as owners of early-generation EVs are learning, maintenance is not cheap. Replacing lithium batteries can run US$15,000 or more.
The reliance on lithium itself is also a hurdle. Very little is extracted and refined in North America – the vast majority is imported from China, which controls 80 per cent of the world’s supply, and prices continue to rise due to increased demand.
While the specific factors were different, Mr. Jobs faced similar challenges 15 years ago when he introduced the iPhone. The naysayers pounced.
“There is low demand for a converged, all-in-one-device,” The Guardian said in a review. Microsoft’s then-CEO Steve Ballmer said, “it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.” And Bloomberg said the iPhone was “nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks.”
A lot of that was subjective criticism. The real problems were the non-Jobs hurdles that stood in Apple’s way, namely finding a partner with the infrastructure to support its transformational vision for the iPhone. The telecommunications infrastructure back then simply did not have the bandwidth for everyone to have a mini-computer in their pockets.
One potential partner, Verizon Wireless, knew immediately that the gap between vision and reality was too wide for it to span.
“Five minutes after I had an iPhone in my hand, it was very clear to me we couldn’t do this,” the company’s marketing head John Stratton said shortly after Mr. Jobs’ presentation to leadership.
The iPhone was ultimately released exclusively with the Verizon rival AT&T, and it revolutionized telecommunications, information technology and even culture.
The lessons from the experiences of Mr. Ford, Mr. Jobs and, now, Mr. Musk, are timeless. Too often the purveyors of conventional wisdom focus on and gripe about the wrong things, and in the process jeopardize the success of ideas that can change the world.