Is Tesla the new iPhone?
Benedict Evans just published a great post on his blog aboutĀ āTesla, software and disruption.ā I recommend a full read. In it, he tries to answer whether Tesla is reallyĀ āthe new iPhoneā and if it will be as disruptive to the car landscape as some/many people think.
In his line of thinking, electric (as opposed to an ICE vehicle) feels a lot more like a sustaining innovation, rather than a disruptive innovation. In other words, it something that incumbents will be able to incorporate. So it will not change theĀ ābasis of competition.ā
The more critical aspect is instead autonomy. Here are two snippets from the piece:
All of this takes us to autonomy. Electric is compelling but will probably be a commodity, whereas Teslaās improvements on top of electric may not be commodities but are not necessarily decisive. Autonomy changes the world in profound ways (I wrote about this here), and itās a fundamentally new technology that doesnāt look at all like a commodity. And Tesla is doing this, too. Sort of.
In this competition, Teslaās thesis is that the data it can collect from its cars will give it a crucial advantage. The only reason that anyone is interested in autonomy today is that the emergence of machine learning (ML) in the last 5 years probably gives us a way to make it work. Machine learning, in turn, is about extracting patterns from large amounts of data, and then matching things against those patterns. So how much data do you have?
But even if we are to all agree that autonomy is the ādisruptive innovationā, it is not yet clear who will get there first. Maybe it is Tesla. Maybe it is Waymo. Regardless, many or most people seem to agree that it will arrive in 202x.
Image: Tesla












