The EV1 was way, way ahead of its time, and was more or less outright killed for various reasons including car makers having deep sunk cost in ICE engine tech. The battery tech back then was vastly inferior to today but it was still good enough for a shorter-range economy EV that could have replaced a gas for a lot of daily commuter drives, especially for two-car families. For reference: the first generation Nissan L…
Why did you name check Musk and not the actual founders of Tesla, Eberhard and Tarpenning, that took advantage of their experience with lithium batteries and the forward-thinking Californian regulatory regime to found their company there to build an electric sports car?
Musk clearly has (or at least had) a great skill when it comes to scaling companies doing hard things. If he had one under his belt, like Tesla, I'd be willing to chalk it up to luck, but he has two: Tesla and SpaceX. Both have been spectacular successes doing things most people run away from screaming with their tail between their legs, namely volume production of innovative cars and aerospace.
IMHO SpaceX is a lot more impressive. There's an old joke: how do you become a millionaire? A: start as a billionaire and found an aerospace company.
I think without him Tesla would have been a boutique car company. They would have made expensive boutique cars for a subset of visionary EV early adopters, but would not have moved the industry. To move the industry you have to grow hard and fast enough to scare legacy car makers into trying to play catch-up, which is what Tesla did. The only other thing I can imagine moving big car makers like this would have been the government mandating an EV transition. Big bureaucratic things only move when kicked.
People hate acknowledging this because Musk's politics have turned so many people off, but unfortunately there appears to be no correlation between skills in one domain and being a generally well adjusted human being. The world doesn't work this way. A person can be good at something and still be a lunatic or an asshole.
I mean... if we dismissed all achievement of people who were assholes or lunatics, we'd basically have to throw out 2/3 of all music.
If anything there might be a slight negative correlation between extreme skill in some domain and being well adjusted, for a variety of reasons including the weird way people treat "savants" in any field. I also suspect a big one is that people with messed up backgrounds (bad childhood, etc.) or psychological issues sometimes "over-compensate" by achieving hyper-skill in some area.
