When assessing Musk's success, note that Tesla has singlehandedly pushed the entire auto industry towards electric vehicles. Before Tesla, electric vehicles were funny experimental things for hipsters. Very few people bought electric cars, and when they did it was usually only as a second car that could drive 100 miles around town. Virtually no major manufacturer were planning on changing that.
After Model 3, all major car manufacturers are changing their product development and production lines to make electric vehicles. It's now clear to everybody involved that in a number of years, it will only, or almost only, be electric vehicles.
Even if Tesla were to end up being a company that only sells a few hundred thousands cars per year, their impact will have been several orders of magnitude bigger. At the end of the next decade, tens of millions of electric cars will be produced every year and Tesla is the company that not only showed the way but forced an entire industry to go in that direction.
Now, why on Earth would Musk not be interested in promoting mass transit? Tesla is unlikely to produce 50 million cars yearly anyways, and - so far - electric vehicles are more expensive than ordinary cars and not much more suitable for dense city traffic than ordinary cars (although the cost is going down and although self-driving capabilities may change that a bit). But for many years to come, it's unlikely that the Boring Company or the Hyperloop is going to cannibalize on Tesla's market.
> Before Tesla, electric vehicles were funny experimental things for hipsters. Very few people bought electric cars,
You're forgetting the biggest competitor to all-electric, the oil industry which lobbied against all-electric cars. GM had an all electric car in the 90's but people were only allowed to lease them.
GM's mediocre EV1 electric car was not going to turn the car industry inside out. The battery technology wasn't even remotely close to ready to enable EVs to replace fossil-fuel vehicles. That includes both production scale capabilities, and the 60-100 mile range of the EV1. It was the Li-ion electronics industry that made today's EV industry possible.
Telsa is what changed the industry. It wasn't subtle, it rattled every car maker into action. They demonstrated the technology was ready, such that you could build a full, proper replacement EV vehicle. A car people actually wanted to buy and drive. Further, the Model S being reviewed as one of the greatest cars ever made, made it clear that you could actually build an extraordinary EV vehicle. Not a hybrid, not a 30 or 60 mile battery joke, a full replacement. GM restarted their EV program entirely because of Tesla.
At least 95% of the credit should go to small electronics driving investment in battery technology.
And then they still aren't good enough for electric cars to make much sense to people spending their money carefully. But that happens in years not decades.
Hyperloop is envisioned to run in 100Pa of pressure. According to the Wikipedia page on vacuum, that is considered "medium vacuum." It's also quite close to the region where offgassing and vapor pressure is going to be a major component of the ambient pressure, which is where you start needing complex vacuum pumps.
> When assessing Musk's success, note that Tesla has singlehandedly pushed the entire auto industry towards electric vehicles.
No, it hasn't. First, because the long-term arc was in that direction anyway, and second because the whole industry hasn't adopted that as the short-term arc.
Tesla has single-handedly raised the near-term prominence of battery-powered all-electric vehicles, sure.
>After Model 3, all major car manufacturers are changing their product development and production lines to make electric vehicles
This does not comport with reality. The Nissan Leaf, for example, came out a full 7 years before the first Model 3. The only thing unique about Tesla's electric vehicles is their willingness to lose many billions of dollars producing them.
> Tesla has singlehandedly pushed the entire auto industry towards electric vehicles.
I would say they led the industry by 2-3 years because of capabilities of making losses (actually not, Chevy bolt came before model 3).
What made electric cars possible is cheap batteries, otherwise they'd have built model3 right out the gate. And Tesla didn't make batteries cheap, consumer electronics did. Tesla doesn't even make battery cells, they buy them from panasonic
Gigafactory is a factory from Panasonic, plus a contract with Tesla that allows Tesla to put its sticker on it. Panasonic also produces batteries for Tesla models in its Japanese factories.
Musk is brilliant at this kind of marketing. Did you know he actually didn't found either Tesla or SpaceX himself?
When assessing Musk's success, note that Tesla has singlehandedly pushed the entire auto industry towards electric vehicles. Before Tesla, electric vehicles were funny experimental things for hipsters. Very few people bought electric cars, and when they did it was usually only as a second car that could drive 100 miles around town. Virtually no major manufacturer were planning on changing that.
After Model 3, all major car manufacturers are changing their product development and production lines to make electric vehicles. It's now clear to everybody involved that in a number of years, it will only, or almost only, be electric vehicles.
Even if Tesla were to end up being a company that only sells a few hundred thousands cars per year, their impact will have been several orders of magnitude bigger. At the end of the next decade, tens of millions of electric cars will be produced every year and Tesla is the company that not only showed the way but forced an entire industry to go in that direction.
Now, why on Earth would Musk not be interested in promoting mass transit? Tesla is unlikely to produce 50 million cars yearly anyways, and - so far - electric vehicles are more expensive than ordinary cars and not much more suitable for dense city traffic than ordinary cars (although the cost is going down and although self-driving capabilities may change that a bit). But for many years to come, it's unlikely that the Boring Company or the Hyperloop is going to cannibalize on Tesla's market.