You can start complaining when Tesla starts begging for a government bailout after producing shitty products for 20 years. In fact, Detroit does so badly that just about any advice would be an improvement. Developing a car like this would have cost them a billion dollars with the same number of delays, except they wouldn't have come up with the idea in the first place.
Let's not forget all the other projects that are "late and over budget, has gone through loads of redesigns, still has bugs". Just about any big project these days are. Construction projects, government restructurings, industrial design projects..it just happens that very much of what happens today is related to software.
Best of all, the conclusion doesn't match the derisive tone of the article. It actually sounds like he's praising the project in the last sentence.
"But the past two years have been rocky for Tesla, which first announced it would build a big factory in New Mexico, then said it would instead build in San Jose, after California dangled incentives to stay in the state."
Oh no! They took advantage of incentives to change their plans.
Yeah, I read that and was unable to understand how this was un-intelligent. Announce something, change plans without committing any work in exchange for payola. Sounds smart to me.
a classic Silicon Valley product—it's late and over budget, has gone through loads of redesigns, still has bugs and, at $109,000, costs more than originally planned.
Ugh. Is that what we're calling "classic" now? The real classic is still two guys in a garage with no schedule and a drop-dead budget ceiling in the thousands.
"I'm very unhappy about what's happened to my company" under Elon, says Eberhard, who still owns about 3 percent of Tesla. "I think he's a terrible CEO." Elon Musk responds that "Martin is the worst individual I've ever had the displeasure of working with."
I do feel like Tesla is working on the wrong car. The future of the electric car is based on achieving cost-competitiveness with gasoline. I'm much more excited about $25k electric sedans, or something like the Chevy Volt.
In the long run yes, but I think they did the right thing to focus on the high end sports market initially. It gets more attraction from the media and creates brand awareness. It's a cool project that attracts the best engineering talent. It allows them to experiment with and push the technology far beyond what would be needed for an every day car with more room for early failure, and perhaps more understanding from early adopters. If they are able to execute on their plan, when regular folks are thinking of purchasing their first fully electric vehicles I think the Tesla name will have a more positive association in people's minds than the Chevy volt.
High end cars also have much higher profit margins. To make money with an affordable car, you need to sell a lot of cars, which takes a lot of infrastructure. As a new company, you don't have that infrastructure yet. Why not sell more profitable cars while you ramp up?
Eh, blogs have been positively drooling over the Volt for some time now, and given that it has the word "Chevy" attached to it, that's saying something.
You can start complaining when Tesla starts begging for a government bailout after producing shitty products for 20 years. In fact, Detroit does so badly that just about any advice would be an improvement. Developing a car like this would have cost them a billion dollars with the same number of delays, except they wouldn't have come up with the idea in the first place.
Let's not forget all the other projects that are "late and over budget, has gone through loads of redesigns, still has bugs". Just about any big project these days are. Construction projects, government restructurings, industrial design projects..it just happens that very much of what happens today is related to software.
Best of all, the conclusion doesn't match the derisive tone of the article. It actually sounds like he's praising the project in the last sentence.