Cars are an interesting piece of technology. There's always minor improvements and tweaks year by year, but I doubt most of us can think of anytime that cars had a general, revolutionary change.
There was this one company though, Tesla, that decided to make an electric car that didn't sacrifice any of the normal things electric cars sacrificed -- the Tesla Model S is a sturdy vehicle, with room for four or five, that can travel farther than any other electrical car. So it's kind of a big deal.
But hey, we've had these sorts of things before, and they've fizzled.
Peculiarly though, it seems like the times are changing. Tesla is announcing that it expects to have profited this quarter.
Normally, I am not fond of speculation, but in this case it reveals a stark trend: if Tesla is confident enough to say that it expects to have finally profited after many quarters of being in the red, it means that the new player has finally taken a bite out of the incumbents, and the game could possibly start to change.
If people are finally flocking to electric cars with enough of a magnitude that they're becoming profitable, we can expect the incumbents to be forced into a total with Tesla. Fortunately for technology, total war has a decent chance of meaning "we have to do what they're doing and make this better so that their company folds, and therefore is no longer a threat".
Investors and companies follow the money trail, people follow what's familiar; if the familiar companies start following the money trails, perhaps we'll be in electric cars sooner than later. Perhaps this one small estimation is signaling the change of tides.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/01/news/companies/tesla-profit/
No comments:
Post a Comment