[loceng]

Sure but arguably he also single-handedly forced the hand of all auto manufacturers in a stagnant auto-oil industrial complex to actually start shifting to EV; seriously, how many lives will be saved in total due to the lessened pollution?

[rsynnott]

With his time machine? The Nissan Leaf and BYD E6 launched in 2010, the Renault Zoe and Tesla Model S in 2012. The electric car changeover is happening due to battery price dynamics; it's fairly simple. Until the mid to late noughties, lithium ions were simply too expensive (and early electric cars using other chemistries simply didn't have acceptable range).

[chillacy]

Steve Jobs didn’t invent smartphones but he made them cool. Tesla is mainstream cool in the way the iPhone was a decade ago.

[matt-attack]

Exactly. Existing ICE companies didn’t have the vision to completely reimagine what an EV shins be. Rethink everything from the ground up, don’t just slap batteries in existing platforms.

[rsynnott]

The Renault Zoe outsells all Tesla models in Europe these days, wasn't built on an existing platform, and came out the same time as the Model S. I believe for the whole of the last decade except for a year around when the Model 3 came out, either the Zoe or the rather similar Nissan Leaf outsold Tesla in Europe.

Tesla's main success story seems to have been the US, presumably due to very lackluster competition. The US isn't a huge market for electric cars, tho.

[unpolloloco]

On that line of argument, you should use the roadster, not the model s.

The Model T wasn't the first car, but it was the first widely accessible and usable one for the masses. Tesla's innovation is more comparable to that.

That said, Elon should have never been in charge of a public company. He's good at challenging the status quo and should keep doing that in new markets. He's a terrible person to be in charge of an established company (which tesla very much is now!)

[rsynnott]

Eh:

> Tesla's cumulative production of the Roadster reached 1,000 cars in January 2010

So about the same time as the Nissan Leaf, a rather more masses-friendly car...

[tw04]

The Nissan Leaf and BYD E6 were exactly why the electric car was going nowhere fast. Nobody is ever trading in their 5-series BMW or S-Class benz for a leaf, period.

The Tesla options are all extremely high performance cars. They're luxury oriented but the interiors left a bit to be desired. Either way the overlap between the market Tesla capture and the leaf captured are almost non-existent.

[xauronx]

I’ve never heard a leaf come up in conversation. I know a handful of people with Tesla’s, and have had my dad ask me about them.