What is Tesla? Is it really the best car in the world that everyone wants and that others imitate? In 2015, the top ten automotive groups, without Tesla, were worth 700 billion on the stock exchange and Toyota alone 200. By 2020 Tesla, founded in 2003 and after having burnt nearly a hundred billion without producing a dollar of profit, had become the first and was worth 550 billions, while the other nine were still roughly on the levels of five years earlier, with Toyota still second at 197. Groups with about a hundred years of experience, hundreds of thousands of employees, research centers, factories run like watches, excellent product portfolios , established distribution networks and over a billion motorists who drive their cars every day. It is so strange, even in the mainstream storytelling of the batteries, to ask ourselves how it is possible and what it means?
We know the simple answer. Tesla is the product of the future that will annihilate the industry as we know it today. Famous brands are evoked with sad stories, from Nokia to Kodak, undermined by those who performed the same function, to make people talk and connect or to immortalize moments in images, only they did it better. The machines are used to move from here to there, safely innfirst of all and then with as many comforts as possible. How would Tesla be disruptive compared to all the others? Just imagine it with a diesel engine and the answer appears.
Those who have studied marketing certainly remember Charles Revson, founder of Revlon and great businessman: “In the factory we produce cosmetics, in the shop we sell hope”.
Tesla manufactures cars at the factory, okay, but who buys it what buys? We see them around like any other car: doors, seats, cockpits. Come in and go out for dinner: what else do you want to do with it? On which side would those who build them be worth three or more times those who build the others? We must accept that its patron, the divine Elon Musk, has found the magic potion that makes all the others pale: there is no diesel engine inside and there never will be. Other brands sell electric cars, but Tesla is the only one who sells “only” those and first of all. An all-in that has cloaked the brand with that aura of anticipatory uniqueness that seduces those who drive it and also those who don’t. In short, is it a car? No, it is used like a machine but it is something else. Is who created it an innovative industrialist, a new Henry Ford? No, he is a genius with a fantastic flair for daring episodes.
Will the auto industry ever turn itself into a gamble? Finance suggests we try, but they use other people’s money. The bitterness remains for an industry that has not had the courage to defend itself, affirming its values against the fashions of those who have nothing to lose.