Full Spectrum War

Full spectrum war also isn’t merely about adding electrification or software to the hardware that the legacies already know how to make or buy. The software ship has been sailing for twenty years, with increasingly tattered sails. The proof? If you wanted to make a fortune in the auto sector in the last ten years, all you had to do was invest in windshield phone mounts.

Electrification? Nothing in third-party networks can touch Tesla Superchargers for speed or ubiquity. VW’s and Porsche’s fast networks are years away. By the time they match Supercharger ubiquity, everyone’s EV range will have rendered charging speeds moot.

OTA updates? Direct sales? Franchise dealer networks are the doom of the auto sector, as they fight tooth and nail to survive, crippling manufacturer efforts to educate, market, sell, and support "new" technologies to customers who are already using them daily, on phones they can buy for a few hundred dollars. Tesla is pushing out updates as often as they can, and doing so seamlessly.

Clean sheet design? Chevy’s Bolt is fine, if you want an economy car with a battery. What is the industry releasing this year? Mild hybrids. Their dedicated EV platforms can’t come soon enough.

Autonomy? The legacy companies’ best semi-autonomy can’t touch Tesla Autopilot at its worst, and full autonomy is too far away to matter.

Sharing and hailing? Again, piecemeal investments and bet-hedging are doomed. Tesla’s strategy here remains to be seen—so why hasn’t anyone tried to get ahead before they do? GM should have bought Lyft when it had the chance.

The Model 3 just dropped. Where’s the competition? Nowhere, save in the minds of the Tesla shorts and legacy brand managers with two to three years to kill before something even conceptually equivalent hits the market—by which time it’ll be too late to stop Musk.

This is in part because Tesla already commands the global automotive PR space, without advertising. Several sources have told me Tesla accounts for 40 percent of all automotive news. (Ed note: Is that all? Seems like more.) This number isn’t going to go down. If you want to see propaganda, collusion, cyberwar, AI, bots, truth, lies, fiction, manipulation, hi-tech, old tech, and no tech leveraged, twisted, bent and wielded, forget Trump and the Russians. Every day my Twitter feed is clogged by Tesla supporters and Tesla trolls waging war with everything but guns. Tesla has motivated an army of online fans and enemies unlike anything the sector has seen since the rise of the internet. That can't be duplicated at any price.

All of it benefits Tesla.

Where is the auto sector in all this? Still hoping that spending money on attacking elements of Tesla’s plan will stop them.

Elon Musk is playing the long game, projecting far beyond the average tenures of the CEOs he’s up against. Unlike his peers, he’s personally invested, for life, in seeing this through.

Which brings us to the Model 3.

The Model 3 Launch

Even without having driven it I can declare it a triumph for Tesla, and a disaster for everyone hoping it would hurt Tesla’s stock price, momentum, or mythology. The mainstream press has been universally positive, despite virtually no mention that Supercharging isn’t included, a question that generated lots of coverage earlier this year. Questions over how many they can build on any schedule are of seemingly no relevance to those on the waiting list. Potential production delays? Ask Ferrari or Porsche about how scarcity affects demand.

The price? No one really cares. Tesla announced two models, with base prices of $35,000 and $44,000, straddling the now-stillborn Chevy Bolt. The real competitor? The BMW 3 Series, which isn’t fully electric but is precisely the customer Tesla wants to convert. Are BMW buyers seeking out base models? Does anyone? Not in the premium segment, which is where Tesla has always been.

The shorts are complaining that it was a fake launch, because the first cars delivered went to employees. This isn’t a defect in Tesla’s plan; it was a feature. Musk had to deliver cars. He did. The cars needed positive press. They got it. They cars had to impress the reviewers. They did.

The Model 3 launch was Tesla’s to lose. Unless one of them caught fire or exploded, it was just another flag in a brilliant PR campaign. Tesla, news, beat, story, stock price. Tesla.

Tesla. Tesla. Tesla.