The Bullish Case for Tesla - Fri, Jun 11, 2021
People hear about a new EV company and say it’s a serious competitor for Tesla. But that can’t be further from the truth.
Electric motors are what move the vehicle, but just having a car with an electric motor doesn’t suddenly make it a Tesla competitor. The same goes with gas cars: a Ford F150, a VW Beetle and a McLaren super car all essentially move by burning similar fuel; but they are not the same and they are not competitors.
A quick electric car is also not necessarily a direct competitor to a Tesla. Acceleration is only one of the many features of it, but not everything.
Adaptive cruise control, lane keep and Autopilot are very important features, but other car companies will eventually catch up once an alternative open source algorithm becomes available online and they can steal.
But even that won’t make automotive giants like VW, BMW, Volvo, Nissan, Mazda and other big names to catch up to what a Tesla vehicle can be.
I remember when the first iPhone came, big (pun intended) phone manufacturers at the time like Nokia failed to understand what made it the killer phone. A shiny new gimmick of the first iPhone was changing the orientation of the screen and apps based on the Accelerometer and that was what Nokia thought they should steal and put it in their Symbian-based phones. That didn’t do it.
Nokia is gone now.
Accelerometer wasn’t iPhone’s killer feature.
I drove a high end VW car recently, the interface looked very high resolution and cool. It looked like they thought a good looking infotainment suite is something they should steal from Tesla to get cool and stay relevant and competitive. That’s a tiny bit true, but not entirely.
Mazda is the funny one, going completely backwards. They removed touch screens from their cars to make them safer. Hehe.
Just as everyone in the world of pre-iPhone smartphones tried to cut costs and used cheap processors and unflexible OSes that looked good enough for their bundled software, mainstream car companies are currently doing the same.
Tesla on the other hand, has over the air updates. It has an extremely fast and respectable processor. It runs AAA games. And that’s its killer feature.
An App Store, probably coming very soon.
History will write, that Tesla’s fart app was the beginning of the end for traditional car companies; just as traditional smartphone makers like Nokia slowly disappered in the mist created by original iPhone’s first fart apps.
Automotive giants are just not good enough at software. That’s a fact. And that’s what makes them fail eventually.
A phone was once mainly a device to make calls. Calling nowadays is just a fraction of what we do with our phones.
Don’t go invest in a new electric car company just because it makes electric cars.