What would these companies invest into if Tesla hadn’t proven long range BEVs to be viable? What could the public and policy makers point to when the old car companies keep stating that there are no current alternatives, that we have to wait another decade or two for their R&D projects to pan out?
Besides, I was replying to a post that said Tesla was unimportant. Well, I personally doubt it, but yeah maybe what VW did -braking the law and harming the health of millions- was even more important.
I think Tesla 'proved' the viability of long range BEVs the same way Newton proved calculus to Liebniz (and I'm only being slightly hyperbolic). Some ideas/discoveries/technologies are more or less inevitable as the newly-existing but disparate building-blocks are there, waiting for a receptive mind to piece everything together and usually with a surprising level or synchrony.
Tesla didn't have any ground-breaking research on battery chemistry, or motor efficiency; they are among the first to packaged everything together after the underlying technology became mature enough, and managed to suck the air away from the other early competitors. If Tesla never existed, the car companies would still invest in electric vehicles.
Edit: I've just discovered that the founding of Tesla itself was inspired by the General Motors EV1 which was in production from 1996[1] and recalled in 2003.
> I think Tesla 'proved' the viability of long range BEVs the same way Newton proved calculus to Liebniz (and I'm only being slightly hyperbolic). Some ideas/discoveries/technologies are more or less inevitable as the newly-existing but disparate building-blocks are there, waiting for a receptive mind to piece everything together and usually with a surprising level or synchrony.
This effect can be observed often in the case of low investment advances like mathematical breakthroughs, inventions that are limited to a bunch of papers, gadgets or Uber for X type, X as a service startups etc. But, it is evidently not true for hard problems, advances that require huge investments, bear enormous risks and uncertain payoff.
The people who go for the relatively low hanging fruits know this very well, evident in their rush to the market, patent or to publish in academic journals.
In contrast, the hard problems, like landing a man on the moon, measuring the higgs boson, retro propulsive landing of orbital rockets or, case in point, the development of long range BEVs would not have happened if someone would have had the ability and courage to go all in at enormous cost and risk. Progress is not automatic! It may appear though but in reality people are sometimes willing to pay enormous prices for lofty goals. Or they don't and progress simply does not happen.
In fact, these tasks are so hard, that none of the achievements mentioned above have been repeated so far, despite arguably ample time for copy cats. No one but NASA went to the moon, no second LHC was built, only SpaceX has landed orbital boosters and the 2012 Model S still has more range than any non Tesla BEV.
Another evidence is that there are problems that we know are arguably solvable and desirable, yet we still haven't solved them, e.g. putting a man or women on Mars, switching to 100% renewable energies, fusion, making certain diseases extinct etc.
I agree. BEVs are, I think, inevitable, and one person or company can only do very little to shift the timeline one way or another.
Which impact Tesla has had, if any, is impossible to measure. It's not even entirely clear that the impact was positive.
(Imagine that a large car company or well funded startup was contemplating a massive investment in BEVs to try and get a first mover advantage, but Tesla got there first, so they decided to invest in hybrids or a new range of SUVs instead. In this word, "but for" Tesla, BEVs might be even more widely adopted. Of course, we have no reason to think that's true, but then, we have no reason to think that, "but for" Tesla, nobody would have done anything with EVs for another 10 years either, and that doesn't stop people from wildly speculating...)
Besides, I was replying to a post that said Tesla was unimportant. Well, I personally doubt it, but yeah maybe what VW did -braking the law and harming the health of millions- was even more important.