Podcast
What A Day
Edward Niedermeyer wrote the book "Ludicrous" and discussed how Tesla's success was driven by strengths that became tragic flaws. He also talked about how Tesla's Silicon Valley startup culture influenced its practices.
Tesla is the first company to bring sort of Silicon Valley startup and venture capital culture into the auto industry. That has a profound effect on how it does everything it does from how it designs...
— Episode: Why Tesla is Spiraling Out of Control
Episode: Why Tesla is Spiraling Out of Control
Edward Niedermeyer wrote the book "Ludicrous" and discussed how Tesla's success was driven by strengths that became tragic flaws. He also talked about how Tesla's Silicon Valley startup culture influenced its practices.
Tesla is the first company to bring sort of Silicon Valley startup and venture capital culture into the auto industry. That has a profound effect on how it does everything it does from how it designs vehicles, how it continuously updates them, how it manufactures them. Some to really good effect and some to less good effect. It's the source of both their strength and their perennial challenges.
One of the things that comes along with that is sort of the eternal optimism and hype that really runs a lot of the venture capital ecosystem.
Being someone who kind of needs to go and see things for myself, I went down to Harris Ranch, which is halfway between LA and San Francisco. And I spent a long Memorial Day weekend there watching. And sure enough, there were lines for the superchargers but they did not open the battery swap station at all.
Instead what Tesla did was they brought in backup superchargers and hooked them up to diesel generators. So it was this very dramatic moment where not only was this sort of technology that they were hyping as this game changer at the time for electric vehicles wasn't real or wasn't being used in a real way but then they were bringing in these polluting diesel generators to charge vehicles and they could have just, if the swap station had been real, allowed customers to use it, which they said they wanted to do.
Ultimately what I found out was that the swap station allowed Tesla to earn a lot more of zero emission vehicle credits from the California scheme. So they were effectively kind of ripping off this carbon offset scheme essentially.