Tesla's Dangerous Sprint Into The Future
An informative and detailed NY Times article. They appear to have changed their focus to more objective reporting about Tesla, after trying to sandbag the company a few years back with a highly negative article by an oil industry-loving reporter who Musk called out for fictitious writing by revealing the electronic logs from the car the reporter was driving.
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Twenty miles east of Reno, Nev., where packs of wild mustangs roam free through the parched landscape, Tesla Gigafactory 1 sprawls near Interstate 80. It is a destination for engineers from all over the world, to which any Reno hotel clerk can give you precise, can’t-miss-it directions. The Gigafactory, whose construction began in June 2014, is not only outrageously large but also on its way to becoming the biggest manufacturing plant on earth. Now 30 percent complete, its square footage already equals about 35 Costco stores, and a small city of construction workers, machinery and storage containers has sprung up around it. Perhaps the only thing as impressive as its size is its cloak of secrecy, which seems of a piece with Tesla’s increasing tendency toward stealth, opacity and even paranoia. When I visited in September, a guard at the gate gave militaristic instructions on where to go. Turning to my Lyft driver, he said severely: “When you complete the drop-off, you are not to get out of the car. Under any circumstances. Turn around and leave. Immediately.”
To hear its executives tell it, Tesla is misunderstood because it is still perceived as a car manufacturer, when its goals are more complex and far-reaching. But at least some people have bought into these grand ambitions. This summer, Tesla’s stock-market valuation at times rose above those of Ford and General Motors, and its worth exceeded $60 billion. It did not seem to matter to investors that the company had never made an annual profit, had missed its production targets repeatedly and had become enmeshed in controversy over its self-driving “autopilot” technologies, or that Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, had conceded that the value of his company, of which he owns about 22 percent, was “higher than we have the right to deserve.” Tesla was a headlong bet on the future, a huge wager on the idea of a better world. And its secretive Gigafactory was the arsenal for a full-fledged attack on the incumbent powers of the car and fossil-fuel industries. The factory would help validate Musk and his company’s seriousness about leading humanity’s turn to greener technologies, with a vision now encompassing solar roofing tiles and battery packs for home and industry. Most crucial, it involved producing millions of Tesla cars and trucks, all of which would be sleek, electric and self-driving.
If ambitions were all it took, Tesla would be crowned the colossus of the global car industry. But rapidly accelerating new technologies have brought uncertainty as well. Automakers are encountering three destabilizing forces all at once: automation, electrification and sharing. And sizing up which companies will be the winners and losers in their wakes is in no way obvious. In terms of self-driving cars, it seems likely that long-established companies — General Motors and Ford, as well as BMW and Audi — will benefit from their substantial reserves of cash and deep manufacturing experience. Because these automakers can invest deeply in research (and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy start-ups), they can remain competitive with companies less inherently cautious, like Tesla and Waymo, the spinoff of Google’s self-driving projects.
Tesla’s goal has always been focused on going green, rather than creating the driverless future. (Its mission is emblazoned on its factory walls: “To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”) Yet as the automobile industry settles on the consensus that self-driving cars are coming — their promise to improve safety and to help ride-sharing replace car ownership for many Americans propels their inevitability — Tesla finds itself in the midst of a contest to do both. This set of challenges should be enough for any company, especially one led by a chief executive whose time is compromised by other business commitments as a founder of a rocket company (SpaceX), a new tunneling operation (the Boring Company), a company planning a human-computer interface (Neuralink) and a nonprofit focused on the dangers of artificial intelligence (OpenAI). But Tesla has given itself a few others too. One is to essentially reinvent modern manufacturing processes at the Gigafactory. Yet another is to create the first mass-market electric car ever. In the meantime, a company that has never made much profit needs to somehow figure out how to do so — that is, to put itself in the black before financial losses and missed deadlines curdle any hope that Tesla inspires, among customers or stockholders, into skepticism.
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/07/magazine/tech-design-future-autonomous-cars-factory-tesla-sustainability-gigafactory.html