The story of Tesla is ludicrous, says author and auto industry journalist Edward Niedermeyer.
In his 2019 book LUDICROUS: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, you can boil the story down to three things:
- Elon Musk is distracted.
- Elon Musk is a hype machine who is an expert salesman and promiser.
- Tesla gets innovation and concept right, but can’t be bothered with building reliable cars.
I have a friend who calculated that it would take 3 extra days to drive from the Rocky Mountains to upstate New York in his Tesla than it would in his trusty pickup truck, so he hopped in the V8 behemoth and drove it cross country. This is not just because of charging times, but because of the routes he’d have to take to find chargers.
This is an Elon problem: never would Musk admit in public that Teslas would slow you down and inconvenience you.
The gullible public and eager, greedy investors are always ready to buy anything Musk promises and says. Hence a few profitable quarters and a massive stock valuation. Which have kept Tesla going despite failed self-driving, messy Cybertruck problems, and models long overdue for updates or replacement.
Musk was distracted from properly running his auto and other empires well before his current political involvement. He clearly is a genius. He clearly is enthusiastic. He seems to actually believe the things he promises. It’s just that he has too much on his plate.
Finally, the act of building cars is a grinding, low margin, difficult, boring sort of thing, the kind of thing geniuses naturally shy away from because they can hire people who can do Julia Child’s “dog’s work” for them.
Except in Musk’s case, he either hired fellow geniuses for whom the mere manufacture of complex consumer goods was as boring as it was for him, or else he frustrated the efforts of competent manufacturing engineers by his overpromising of unready features or unbuildable tech or style.
LUDICROUS is from 2019, so Musk’s DOGE involvement is missing, as is the current Tesla stock volatility and the acts of violence against Teslas on the street and at dealerships. But otherwise, the book is surprisingly good background reading for today’s headlines.
Meanwhile, the car beatings and burnings shall continue until nobody’s morale is improved.
