Note that Rob’s intent with forwarding my post was not so much to talk about Tesla specifically, but to talk about how disruption changes the world.
For instance, take AT&T hiring McKinsey to tell them how many cell phones will be in use 15 years from then. McKinsey’s answer was wrong by two orders of magnitude. I don’t believe this is a unique example of experts failing to see the coming disruption.
Even when the disruptive product is available on the market, people often don’t see how it changes things. There’s Balmer’s famous laughing off of the iPhone in 2007, but perhaps even more interesting is how Nokia and Sony and Blackberry, which already had big screen smartphones, got blindsided anyway. Heck, I even owned a Sony P800, which was completely touchscreen.
When iPad first came out, many were dubious it would be successful. “Just a larger iPod Touch” was a common dismissal. And yes, people dismissed not only the Tesla Roadster, but Model S as well.
In all these cases, the “new thing” was lacking something the old thing had - whether that be a keyboard or a multi-process operating system or a way to quickly refill a tank. But, the new thing had other benefits that out-weighed what was missing, at least for some applications, and so the companies were able to build upon their successes, and the new things just got better and better.
It’s not just things. Look what Salesforce did to SAP, Amazon to Borders and then almost all of retail, Netflix to Blockbuster - the list of disruptions is surprisingly long.
In this particular case, Tony Seba is predicting that EVs are not the final disruption in transportation. In his mind, EVs have already beaten ICE vehicles. Now, he sees that when AEVs (Autonomous Electric Vehicles) are ready, the very model of individual car ownership will change. It’s no longer that people will buy Teslas instead of Toyotas, it’s that people won’t be buying cars at all. Between the mileage longevity and lower costs per mile for EVs and lower insurance rates from autonomous driving, it will be practical to run what might be described as Uber with robot driven vehicles. Call a small car to take you to the mall, hours later call an SUV to take you and your purchases home. Call a car to pick your kid up at school (only his/her smartphone unlocks the car) and take them home or to soccer practice. Seba predicts this will save the average American over $5000 a year, so the change-over will be swift.
Anyway, the larger point here is to think about what Disruption really is and how to identify it. Disruption often gets dismissed as a joke on HBO’s Silicon Valley, but it really is a thing to which we should be paying attention, as it causes teutonic shifts in which companies thrive and which die.