Have you thought much about an electric car? Almost all the major automobile manufacturers are now on the bandwagon, with promises to convert to a 100% battery electric vehicle (BEV) fleet by between 2025 and 2035. One of the major manufacturers, with a greater market capitalization than the next ten automobile manufacturers combined, will soon surpass the manufacturing rate of BMW, an esteemed century old manufacturer, to vault itself into a top ten manufacturer by volume. 

Not bad for Tesla, a car company not even twenty years old yet. 

Tesla’s enigmatic owner, Elon Musk, is certainly controversial, perhaps by choice. His name is so inextricably linked to Tesla and his space-race company, SpaceX, that any attention centered on Musk also shines a light on Tesla. Perhaps there is a method in his madness. Phineas T. Barnum once said “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Few people are aware of Tesla because they have driven one or researched buying an all-electric sedan or SUV. Most know of Tesla through Musk and some of his endeavors and what many label as his antics.  

Once one sees the tremendous engineering that his companies accomplish on a regular basis, it is hard to not take notice. 

Musk’s SpaceX was founded on a premise that one learns from failure. In every endeavor we perform, we hope and expect to succeed. When we succeed, we have learned little about the potential weaknesses or fragility of our plans. It is only in doing our best, failing, and then diagnosing what went wrong do we learn how to make our design more robust. 

In the space race of the 1960s, NASA tried to do something very difficult. Three lives were lost in a fire before Apollo 1 could launch, an X15 disintegrated at the edge of space and killed one test pilot, and two Space Shuttle accidents caused the loss of 14 lives. Three Soviet cosmonauts died during a docking mishap at their space station, and another died when his capsule’s parachute failed to open following reentry. These equipment failures all resulted in what Musk calls a Rapid Unintended Disassembly. 

Each of these accidents resulted in improvements in design. While we wish all accidents could be avoided, failure fuels innovation. 

Unfortunately, both NASA and major car companies fear failure to the point that planning and planning and more planning, over a span not of months but many years, ensure that highly refined, and incredibly expensive, vehicles for space or earth are well-engineered. 

And yet, they still fail. 

Musk had the audacity in spaceflight to do something no other agency or manufacturer dared do. In fact, when Musk started SpaceX, he was the only viable spacecraft manufacturer to not be government employed or a major government contractor. He is doing so at a tenth to a hundredth the cost of his competitors precisely because he prototypes, tests, determines failure and weak points, redesigns, and tries again, often within days or weeks. He does not stop building and innovating while a commission meets for a year or two to analyze publicly what went wrong. He can then cram more innovation into a year than NASA can in a decade. 

That cost advantage, and time advantage by getting to market far earlier than any other manufacturer can, is the key to Musk’s midas touch. 

Before I return to Tesla, this mentality has allowed Musk to build a spacecraft that can launch satellites far cheaper than any rocket maker. He has brought more than a hundred of his boosters back from space to be used again. While for every other commercial manufacturer, a booster and all its rocket engines are disposable, Musk has reused some of his ten times already. But for one partial failure in space, and one loading accident on the ground, and a few unsuccessful booster landings at first, his rockets’ record is one of the two or three best in the industry. 

And yet, he is now about to abandon his Falcon 9 approach to favor a new rocket that is the largest in the world, with a thrust and capacity greater than the Saturn V that launched Americans to the moon. When his new Starship and its associated Super Heavy Booster go to space for the first time in a couple of months, no company or country will have the capabilities and array of equipment that Musk has built. 

Musk admits that there is a good chance his first launch to space of his new Starship may not succeed. If it does not, SpaceX will learn much to improve the design. It is this courage to make repeated mistakes and learn from them that has allowed SpaceX to lead the world. His same audacity to succeed in making an electric car when so many others have failed is precisely why Tesla is overall the best car manufacturer in the world. 

It is not just his willingness to fail that allows him to innovate at a pace roughly ten times his competitors. It is also his ability to constantly rejig designs. His spacecraft and automobiles are modified constantly. Even once a car is purchased, the software that is so obviously essential for an electronic car allows Tesla to update features every few months in the vehicles he has already sold. 

Musk also believes in vertical integration. While other manufacturers were forced to shut down manufacturing for want of a small computer chip for something perhaps as insignificant as a windshield wiper motor. Musk designs his own chips so he can quickly reprogram the chips or their design to overcome bottlenecks that afflict his competitors. I would not be surprised if Musk even leverages that expertise into his own chip manufacturing plant. 

These strengths combine to give Musk a two or three year lead on all his competitors that have the luxury of imitation. In fact, at times Musk makes it easy for them to compete by putting some of his innovations in the public domain for all to copy. When one is in the lead, one can constantly look back and fear competition, can become complacent and be quickly overtaken, or can run so fast that nobody can catch her. Musk is in the latter category. 

Musk can sell you a car with greater range than most all of his competitors, and likely greater range than your bladder. His cars will also go faster, and are consistently listed as the safest cars on the road. They self-drive partially, and he may well soon produce the world’s first fully self-driving car. Oh, and to charge these cars if you are on a long trip away from home, he has built out his own national charging network. 

He is also striving to bring the cost of a car down by reducing by an order of magnitude the number of moving parts requiring installation. This reduces manufacturing and labor costs. He can still sell you a state-of-the-art car at a reasonable price but also earn a large profit margin on each vehicle sold. I’m confident that he will build an electric car for the masses soon, with a price less than $30,000, and perhaps less than $20,000 after subsidies contained in President Biden’s proposed Build Back Better bill. 

Most of us will trade up and drive an electric car within ten or fifteen years. Few of us would be doing so in two decades were it not for Musk. I’m a fan of all that Musk has accomplished, but my real interest in his accomplishments is in imagining what he could do next. We can go so far toward stopping and then reducing global warming if he could bring his focus to rebuilding the electric grid around direct current transmission, using Interstate right-of-ways to install solar panels, route grid power, and even install wireless charging on our nation’s major highways. 

He is spurring on research into carbon capture and sequestration that will truly address global warming, especially compared with the greenwashing carbon credit schemes currently pedaled by others. He already operates the world’s largest rooftop solar installation, and can take the resource of his Solar City company to further spur solar installation. Such facilities can be coupled with improved versions of his already competitive grid storage batteries that allow energy generated by solar power during the day to energize our homes at night. 

He may someday take his engineering and entrepreneurial spirit to nuclear fusion and improved fission so we can permanently rid ourselves of any need to burn hydrocarbons again, and have both the energy to sequester carbon and the ability for Gen IV nuclear plants to consume the stockpiles of radioactive materials left at every nuclear power facility in our country. 

Finally, to preserve a rainforest, and sell carbon credits in the process, sounds like a wonderful thing to do. But, a forest removes the most carbon dioxide when its trees are at its healthiest point. To allow trees to overmature and die actually puts back into the atmosphere much of the carbon dioxide it once sequestered, and also emits methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas. I’d love to see Musk use his talents to figure out how to harvest more lumber from optimally managed forests so we can build homes, and permanently sequester carbon, while we shelter the world’s homeless and underprivileged families. 

There is so much that someone like Elon Musk can do by thinking out of the box and beyond the groupthink that poisons and paralyzes many institutions. I’d be surprised if someone who is not as iconoclast as Musk could accomplish nearly so much. Musk is not afraid of a good idea that obviates the ideas that came before it, while so many others cling to past ideas for fear of change or perhaps for fear of the energy it takes to keep up with change. These are people who probably publicly resent Musk but privately admire him. And his critics, often with an ulterior motive, certainly take their shots at him, mostly because he succeeds. That is his cross to bear, and I bet he wears it with joy. 

Musk was named Time Person of the Year recently, but even that recognition, for better and worse, is not even nearly proportional to the fundamental value, and positive effect on mitigating global warming, that Musk has and will  fulfill.