Getting to the future before the rest of humanity usually costs extra. I was reminded of this during a recent trip up the West Coast in an all-electric Tesla Model S. By the end of the six-day drive to Whistler, B.C., from San Diego, I'd learned a lot about both electric cars and the price of being an early adopter.
Electric vehicles are a tiny subset of the automotive world – in North America, they make up about a quarter of 1 per cent of the market. But as history has proven, that's going to change.
Pulling into a Tesla Supercharger station in Southern California, I realized that I was entering a new driving universe. The station looked like a spaceship, with a row of charge ports and a curved roof studded with solar panels. I plugged in the Model S next to one owned by Jim Muscarella, an engineer who specializes in large-scale energy projects. Muscarella bought his first Tesla in 2008, the first year they became available. Now he has three.
Muscarella's life seemed like a real-world version of Tony Stark's (the fictional inventor who turned himself into Iron Man). Muscarella tracks his car's charge through an iPhone app. His home is covered with solar panels that charge his cars and feed power back into the grid. He travels the United States for free, powered by the sun.
Muscarella's car isn't cheap. The Model S starts at just less than $80,000, and a fully-loaded performance model such as the one I drove can reach $140,000. But Muscarella is willing to pay what it takes to be part of the automotive future – today.
Tesla owners tend to be the kind of people who bought computers back in the 1980s. They knew the typewriter would become a dead technology, and paid a premium to be part of a new world.
Heading north in the Tesla along the California coast, I was experiencing a real-world example of what Everett Rogers wrote about in Diffusion of Innovations, the 1962 book that analyzed the way we adopt new technologies.
Rogers broke consumers into a series of groups, and showed how their behaviour determines whether an innovation lives or dies. The first people to try new things make up a tiny group known as Innovators – pioneers who experiment with new technology and are willing to put up with the hassle and risks that innovation often entails. A good example of Innovators are the Wright brothers. Then come Early Adopters, who help grow an innovation, such as Charles Lindbergh, who took up flying when airplanes were better known than they were during the Wrights' time but were still highly experimental.
Early Adopters are key to the success of a new technology – they test it, help improve it and convince others it's worth trying; Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic helped spark the development of commercial aviation. Early Adopters create a critical mass and influence the next, larger groups that take up a technology – the Early and Late Majority. These groups put an innovation over the top. When the Majority starts buying, a product goes mainstream and pushes aside what came before, as when the Model T killed off the horse and buggy, or when the smartphone rendered the conventional cellular handset obsolete.
Rogers placed his consumer groups on a Bell Curve chart. Innovators made up 2.5 per cent, Early Adopters 13.5 per cent. Together, the Early and Late Majority made up 68 per cent. And then came one final group, which made up 16 per cent: Laggards. These are recalcitrant consumers who adopt a technology or style so late in the game that it's become passé, such as parents discovering Facebook even as their children abandon it in droves.
In his book, Rogers looked at factors that determine whether a new technology would achieve widespread acceptance. One of them is cost. Innovators and Early Adopters tend to be successful people who are willing to pay a premium to be on the leading edge, but attracting the masses demands a clear value proposition. Electric cars such as the Mitsubishi iMiev and Nissan Leaf have gained a following among the Early Adopter crowd, for example, but limited range and high cost have so far kept the Early and Late Majority away.
The electric car movement has seen more than its share of Innovators, such as the guy who converted a Honda hatchback to electric power and towed a streamlined trailer behind him with a diesel generator inside it, running flat out to give him unlimited range. Early Tesla owners, including Muscarella, weren't far behind. They bought Tesla's first model, the tiny, Lotus-based Roadster, when it came to market in 2008 and learned how to live with an electric car in a gasoline-powered world.
The Tesla owners I met are all Innovators or Early Adopters. Physics professor Chuck Robertson showed me some Tesla software tricks and walked me through the Model S's energy use model. Monika Kozdrowiecka, a Los Angeles entrepreneur who owned two Model S's, showed me how to use the iPhone app to unlock her second car, which was located 200 miles away. She can check its power level, and honk the horn from anywhere. Amazing.
By the time my trip was over, I'd spent nothing on fuel, and seen the advantages of the Tesla's electric powertrain – silent, smooth and mechanically simple. The Tesla's motor is the size of a small beer keg, and produces 416 horsepower. When I decelerated, it turned into a generator, feeding power back into the battery.
I had entered the automotive future. But there was a price to pay. Fill-ups took longer than they do with a gas car – about 40 minutes at a Supercharger station, and many times that through a standard electrical outlet. And I had to plan ahead to ensure I'd have a place to charge.
But I still came away wanting a Tesla of my own. I guess I'm an Early Adopter. Better that than a Laggard.
If you have questions about driving or car maintenance, please contact our experts at globedrive@globeandmail.com.
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