A decade later, Tesla now officially a threat to the auto industry. It’s funny, electric car company Tesla has been building its business for a decade now, but it’s just in recent months that the auto industry seems to be taking Tesla’s innovations as an actual threat to their businesses.
That’s because it’s only been in 2013 that Tesla has shown how it can make a small profit and use its popular electric car to compete with competitors in the auto biz. But reacting to a threat when it’s finally arrived, versus skating to where the puck is going isn’t necessarily the best way to run a business. The tech industry is littered with late-movers like Blockbuster or Kodak. While former GM exec Bob Lutz early on admitted that Tesla helped inspire the creation of the Volt, GM’s CEO Dan Akerson just created a small team within GM to study Tesla and its innovations, Bloomberg reported recently.
Tesla — even at this early stage — is already showing how it can compete with the much larger and older auto companies with sales. Esla Is The New Apple — The Tesla Collection. Sure, it’s an obvious comparison, one that’s been made many times in the past year or two.
But it’s a comparison that’s worth pondering in some detail -- not just for what it tells us about Tesla, the company, but also for what it tells us about the near-term outlook for the automobile industry in general. The parallels between the two companies are easy enough to spot: Tesla has a rapidly accelerating (if still unproven) business driven by a radical new philosophy of transit, a business that has as its core product a sleek machine capable of its own, more literal, version of rapid acceleration. It has a small but intensely devoted customer base. In Elon Musk, Tesla has a charismatic and combative CEO simultaneously running three pathbreaking companies in different industries. (Steve Jobs, mind you, only managed two at one time.)
The question is whether Tesla is the Apple of 1985 or the Apple of 2005. But somehow cars are supposed to be immune from all that. Jimmy_wales: Let's Build a Goddamn Tesla... Timoreilly: Let's build a Tesla Museum... Nikola Tesla museum campaign earns $500,000 online in two days : science. Help save Nikola Tesla's land, and help build a museum for Tesla, right on top of his old land in NY where he was trying to complete his project for wireless energy for everyone! : technology.
Original Pitch on The Oatmeal. Let's Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum. Nikola Tesla was the father of the electric age.
Despite having drop-kicked humanity into a second industrial revolution, up until recently he's been an unsung hero in history books. If you don't know who Tesla is, go read this. Tesla's final laboratory is located in the sleepy town of Shoreham, New York. It's known as Wardenclyffe and it's where Tesla attempted to build a tower that would provide free wireless energy to the entire earth.
Unfortunately, Tesla lost his funding before the project was completed and in 1917 the Wardenclyffe tower was demolished. However, the land, laboratory, and foundation beneath the tower are still there and very recently went up for sale. There is currently another offer on the table from someone who wants to purchase the property potentially tear it down or turn it into a retail establishment. The folks behind this project are a 501(c) non-profit organization and they've spent the past 15 years trying to find a way to save this property.