Musk's biggest achievement is changing the Conventional Wisdom[1] of government policymakers in the west from "electric vehicles are a nice idea, but a toy for rich people" to "right, we're phasing out fossil fuel powered cars" in the space of a decade.
That is something I did not expect to see in my lifetime.
You will quibble that lots of other people did the technical work. But Musk had the public visibility.
That's a pretty wild statement, even if it was about Tesla instead of Musk.
Especially considering that a ton of these policies are about as old as the Tesla roadster. Must be a hell of a achievement to change policy retroactively.
The reason why we have an electronic car revolution now is because batteries have finally become cheap and dense enough. Maybe the largest manufacturer of EVs deserves some credit, but that's of course never been Tesla.
I don't know what newspapers you read. Even the Model S was wildly successfull by 2017. I certainly read about that car topping sales charts in Norway thanks to government subsidies in 2013 or so.
There were government subsidies for EV cars more than 18 years ago, and they were almost everywhere 18 months ago. Anyway, what newspapers report and what's the "conventional wisdom of policymakers in the west" is unrelated, if we even accept that "the west" and "conventional wisdom of policymakers" aren't nebulous constructs.
I was talking about announcements of government policies in various European countries to prohibit or tightly limit sales of new fossil fueled vehicles by 2030 or 2035 or similar year, not about current annual sales of vehicles.
As I said, the conventional wisdom changed from "electric vehicles are not practical" to " we must have only electric vehicles" in the space of a decade in which Tesla showed that EVs could be as practical as fossil fuel vehicles.[1] Other manufacturers (VW, Toyota, Hyundai-Kia, etc., are now scrambling to catch up.
1. Yes, the Nissan Leaf was there too, and a few others, but it/they suffered from short range and/or other compromises, so the "impractical" label remained in the minds of policymakers. And it/they suffered from undermarketing, because the makers didn't want to cannibalise their ICE vehicle sales.
Musk's biggest achievement is changing the Conventional Wisdom[1] of government policymakers in the west from "electric vehicles are a nice idea, but a toy for rich people" to "right, we're phasing out fossil fuel powered cars" in the space of a decade.
That is something I did not expect to see in my lifetime.
You will quibble that lots of other people did the technical work. But Musk had the public visibility.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_wisdom