I'll be the first to admit that I am not Elon Musk's biggest advocate. While I detest his public persona, leadership style and management style — I have heard from those in the trenches how he operates — there's one thing that cannot be denied: Musk has built something stupendous.
And, frankly, he disrupted the entire automotive industry.
We know this because as of today there's not even one electric vehicle that really can hold a candle to his offerings. And that's with all of these Teslas flaws. If current trends hold, there's going to be a significant downward trend for the tried and true badges. There's no way around it.
But how? In a recent interview, Musk even admits that he thought the competition would have ramped up in about three years. Simply put though, they're just not there.
Musk then drives home a crucial point. Musk notes that he believes its because the competition isn't building EVs that have soul. And he's not using "soul" in the traditional way journalists do. He means, they're just not building and designing great products. It's all done by spreadsheets.
So, is Musk right?
The CEO added that “the car industry is just fairly slow to evolve” and he believes that they “didn’t take electric vehicles really seriously” until 2014 or 2015 – giving Tesla a significant lead.
Musk also argued that competitors make many cars with “no soul”:
“And the overarching goal is, what can we do to make you fall in love with this car? And I think the biggest thing about Tesla and the cars that we make is that this is not designed by a soulless corporation. There’s not like some finance spreadsheet or something like that with some market analysis. There’s none of that. Obviously we need to bring in more money than we spend, but at the end of the day we want to make a car that we love, that hits us in the heart, that makes you feel. And how many of these cars, they have no soul.
He added:
“They make all these cars that have no soul or no heart, and they wonder why nobody feels anything for them. Why should they?”
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