[herlitzj]

afavour (via Benedict Evans) c. 2005

- No charging network, can't drive away from home

- Battery tech not there, no realistic range

- Too expensive, no one will pay that much for a car they can't drive anywhere

- Everyone wants an SUV or an affordable sedan, not some niche vehicle. Who's going go buy it?

Which ones has Tesla solved?

Moving an industry takes time. Will Boom do it? Who knows. But this line of thinking is kind of short sighted and defeatist, don't you think?

[iainmerrick]

Tesla has at least partly solved some of those, no?

- Charging network: don’t they have their own network? I’m sure it’s not widespread enough to meet everyone’s needs, but it’s not nothing and helped get the ball rolling.

- Battery tech: has been gradually improving, range is now in the hundreds of miles which is enough for many uses.

- Too expensive / everybody wants an SUV: starting with luxury and sports models and gradually following up with mass-market models addresses both of these.

So I think the analogous questions for Boom are good and valid questions. Tesla had decent answers and Boom should too.

[nacs]

That's the point OP is making -- that people early on will be nay-sayers (like in the 2005 post) that then turns out to be false.

[iainmerrick]

Ah, I see, thanks!

I still think the questions are perfectly reasonable. But maybe it just needs to be phrased as “how do they plan to address these?” rather than “which ones have they solved?”

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> that then turns out to be false.

That then turned out to become increasingly false over time. Buying the early stage product is a risky bet, you hope it will take off like that, but it might not. They do need a plan to address them, and to be trustworthy.

[corndoge]

That was gp's point I think, that Tesla was panned at first and solved their challenges, no reason to dismiss Boom.

[tw04]

Those were issues of infrastructure which weren't built out, but could be built out.

Are you planning on refueling the boom mid-air at supersonic speeds?

Tesla also took an approach that analysts who clearly weren't "car guys" weren't expecting: mainly creating something with massive HP and TQ. Previous electric cars had yawn-inducing performance. Someone buying a 5-series probably at least partially bought it for the performance, when they got behind the wheel of a model S it was like getting behind the wheel of a modified M5.

Boom isn't bringing anything new to the table to solve the issues people have listed. Tesla had a plan to solve those issues from the get-go.

[_ph_]

Boom is bringing to the table that the technology has advenced in the last 50 years and even the Concorde might have succeeded, if a second iteration had made it to the market. Also, partially the Concorde failed because Boeing opposed it. They were working on their own supersonic plane but were a few years behind. Unfortunately, they were so successful in blocking the Concorde, that their own project failed as the market had become convinced that supersonic flight doesn't work out.

[sidewndr46]

More importantly, where is the budget to "contribute" to the campaigns of enough senators to get the ban on supersonic flight overturned?

[redler]

Major airlines like United have a powerful lobbying presence. If Boom starts hitting milestones, influence spigots will open.

[ibeckermayer]

Supersonic transoceanic flight seems like a very valuable capability in and of itself

[MattGaiser]

Tesla has built a charging network, done a lot of work on the battery/range, and built an electric SUV.

So I would say they have made at least solid progress on three of them.

[herlitzj]

That's the point. Sitting at the start and saying "We're not at the finish" isn't a useful way to get anywhere

[fairity]

It should be obvious that the market will eventually support supersonic flights. The question is just when. OP is probably asking these questions to determine if the time is now, or in the future.

[542354234235]

Why? What customers is this meant to serve in the commercial airline market? The Concorde overwhelmingly catered to high end business travelers, which made sense at the time. Every hour you were in the air was an hour you couldn’t be doing business. Time is money so if you need to get across the Atlantic, making the trip as short as possible was worth the price. Now we have airplanes with WIFI, we have laptops, we have smart phones. Now you can remain comfortable, productive, and connected on your flight. Secondarily was the rich persons market.

You also gave up a lot of comfort to ride the Concorde. That would be even more true today with excellent business-class options on most airlines and many world-class first-class products like the Etihad A380 “Apartments”. Are high end business flyers or rich tourists really going to trade that to save 4 hours between New York and London in high enough numbers to sustain a regular route?

There is also the exclusivity factor, but that is already highly served by private jets. Then finally, just the experience. But is that enough to fill the seats every day?

Supersonic flight is a really cool idea but the reality involves a lot of tradeoffs. When it comes down to people actually buying tickets and looking at the customer base, I just don’t see it as some slam dunk product.

[ghaff]

There's clearly a market for it. It's just that the market is probably a very different size if a one way trans-Atlantic ticket is $5K vs. if it's $20K.

[afavour]

To be clear, my post was not written by me, but by Benedict Evans. I reposted it here as it felt like a worthy discussion point.

It might be interesting to see Benedict’s comments on Tesla circa 2005 to see how they compare to Boom today.

[herlitzj]

True. Updated to reflect your source

[jollybean]

Telsa was selling hype to a lot of consumers willing to wait for perfection.

Boom is selling a tiny handful of planes.

So they have to solve these problems, largely when they launch.

Airlines are not going to run at a loss for a decade while things tune up.

[jbverschoor]

No it didn’t. It sold a lotus Elise, because it was the cheapest way to deliver a car, and the MVP to showcase electric. It did not at all sell hype to consumers waiting for perfection

[jollybean]

The early Teslas were overpriced for value delivered. They had shorter range, build problems etc..

People wanted to buy them because they were 'buying a dream' - and helping to move the ball forward.

There was a huge amount of 'good faith' in the process by early customers and supporters. Even to this day.

Tesla is an aspirational brand and people are paying an aspirational premium.

Boom will definitely be that as well. Execs will humble brag about their Boom flights, everyone will talk about - it's super exciting, super cool.

The issue I'm pointing to is scale ... will those smaller tranche of buyers be able to support all of the operational overhead of the airline and the ongoing R&D of the company ... is the question.

[herlitzj]

Honestly even if all we get out of this is an affordable low-carbon jet engine I'd call it a win. At the end of the day, Tesla is battery company that makes cars. Maybe Boom should try to be a jet engine company that makes planes.

edit: I say this as someone having little to no real knowledge of the aerospace industry :)

[nradov]

Elon Musk now claims that the final production Tesla Roadster used very few Lotus Elise parts. Even though the vehicles looked similar they ended up changing almost everything, and in retrospect using the Elise platform didn't save them anything.

[bryanlarsen]

Starting with the Elise provided a massive benefit: the ability to iterate. Big Design Up Front would have massively failed -- there were way too many unknown unknowns.

In the end the product was nothing like the Elise. But intermediate products were like the Elise, and could be driven and test manufactured and could inform revisions. A half complete scratch design could not have been.

[nickik]

Questionable. Going to a company that had experience with car body designs and getting an in-house designer would likely have been a better plan for them.

[bryanlarsen]

Many of their problem was due to the assumption that the electric car motor & batters from AC Propulsion were working as advertised and ready for mass production. That assumption was wrong. So the iteration was because changes in the propulsion system resulted in changes to the car, and changes in the car led to changes in the propulsion system.

[FireBeyond]

Elon also claims that he was the sole founder of Tesla...

... after he bought out the founder(s).

[gibolt]

It was barely an Elise by the time they shipped. So many changes were needed, that they said they'd have been far better off starting fresh, which is what they did with the S.

[jbverschoor]

I don't think that would've been better. It gave them a good start for a POC/MVP.

It's the same as some people who say "next startup, I'll go straight to insert scalable architecture". That doesn't work. You need your flexibility to experiment and find what really works in the beginning.