Now, before I begin, I would like to preface this by saying that I respect the heck out of Elon Musk, and his bull-by-the-horns style of business. People like him are few and far between, and he is doing big things, not only with Tesla, but also with SpaceX.
With that being said, I just don’t get it. It’s a low-optioned Mercedes on electric motors.
“But the autopilot!” The band-wagoners cry out.
Well, cruise control was invented in 1948 by Ralph Teetor. In 1995, Mitsubishi released one of the first variants of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), a system which nowadays, uses a radar sensor on the front of the vehicle to not only maintain your speed, but adjust it based on your distance from the car you are following. As early as 2013, ‘lane assist,’ a feature that uses sensors to detect the lane stripes and keep the car centered in the lane could be found on Mercedes, BMW, Jeep/Chrysler, General Motors, Honda, Subaru, Volvo, Mazda, and Kia vehicles.
With ACC and lane assist, these cars were as close to autonomous as their corporation’s lawyers let them be. My friend, who worked at a Chrysler dealership for a summer, told me he hopped on the highway in a Grand Cherokee, turned on ACC and lane assist, and relaxed as the car took him from the Boston area up to Maine, the same feature Tesla is calling ‘Autonomy,” which is a dangerous phrase to throw into today’s marketplace.
“B-b-but insane mode!”
Yes. Electric motors are fast. This is not groundbreaking. The McLaren P1, the Ferarri LaFerarri, the Porsche 918, Koenigsegg Regera, all have electric motors for their explosive low-end power. Even this most recent season of Formula 1 cars have Hybrid power plants.
With this being said, Here are a few notable advancements Tesla has made: their lane change feature in ‘autonomous’ mode means that you just turn the blinker on in the direction you want to change lanes, and the car makes all the checks for safety and proceeds when it is clear. They replaced the standard center console/dash area with a massive touchscreen, which is definitely something we will see a lot more of in the near future. Finally, in a very admirable and forward-thinking move, they made all their patents open-source, allowing anyone to use their inventions and technology to further the growth of electric cars.
Ultimately, Tesla just does not have the size or resources to thoroughly engineer every little piece of their vehicles to the level that any other manufacturer would call “acceptable.” Rushing cars into production, weather stripping and carpet failures only make Tesla look like they were far too overzealous and did not do their due diligence. It also makes me very hesitant about entrusting my life to their much more complex features, like autopilot.
Ultimately, despite all of my qualms, I’m rooting for Tesla. I’d love to see a small-time company come up and scare the big manufacturers. I’d love to see an electric vehicle speed war -- but as it stands right now --Tesla is spending too much time marketing themselves as the Karl Benz of electric cars, when they should be spending their resources trying to become the Henry Ford of electric cars.
