Hamish McKenzie - Insane Mode: How Elon Musk’s Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil

In certain sectors like automotive and solar and space, you dont see new entrants.

The first car I drove for any reasonable period of time was a 1983 Ford Laser with a manual choke. As a sixteen-year-old who needed to get places, I learned the delicate art of gradually modulating the choke to achieve the perfect mixture of air and gasoline so that the little Laser would purr like a panther in a piano box. The cars paint was gold, but the years had faded its luster so that it settled into more of a dusky brown. I called it Brown-Brown and drove it all around Alexandra, New Zealandpopulation 5,000and to nearby swimming holes, sports grounds, and make-out spots in the scrubby hills that surrounded my hometown.

Other than mastering the choke, I didnt know much about the car and didnt really care to find out. My dad, a physicist who knew how to choreograph Brown-Browns bits and bobs so that it performed the miracle of propulsion, took care of all the maintenance. All I had to do was fill it up with gas and stop it from stalling on a black-iced back road in the middle of nowhere. And that was fine with me.

Later, while I was picking fruit at a local orchard during university holidays to earn rent money, I did make an attempt to learn how cars worked. By that point, I had upgraded to a 1991 Toyota Corona, which by my standards was a luxury vehicle. It was not only chokeless but it also had an automatic transmission. One hot day, I was on the top step of my ladder among cherry trees while my car-literate friend in the neighboring tree explained to me how an internal combustion engine works. Despite my fathers influenceand much to his disappointmentI was an arts student and did not have a mind for mechanics. While I committed terms like carburetor, piston, and camshaft to memory between mouthfuls of cherries, I struggled to recall in which order they interacted, or if they interacted at all. My friend soon grew frustrated with my ineptitude, and I resigned myself to the notion that this fiendishly complicated wizardry would remain forever out of my reach. And that was fine with me.

My ambivalent relationship with motor vehicles continued even after, at twenty-nine years old, I moved to the United States of America, the spiritual home of the automobile. At the wheel of my wifes 2001 Honda Civic, I learned how to drive on the wrong side of the road and fine-tuned my aggression on the gas pedal so that I could stave off death on the highways, but I remained ignorant of how spark plugs sparked and timing belts belted. Indeed, I avoided driving whenever I could and came to believe that the world would be better off without cars. In one of the first pieces I wrote since joining the tech news site PandoDaily, I implored Silicon Valley to rid us of them. I felt that the environmental costs of cars and roads were unacceptable when the climate was warming at such a rate that thered soon be more deaths from heatstroke than from motor accidents. Cars were death traps, health hazards, planet killers, and insidious isolation engines, I reasoned. Whod want them?

Of course, lots of people wanted them, and path dependency is real. Wed already carved up mountains, paved over swamplands, and invented garages to cater to our four-wheeled wonder wagons, so giving up on them now hardly seemed realistic. After a multitude of commenters disabused me of my car-free fantasy, I breathed a sigh of concession and moved on.

It was about then that I discovered Tesla.

I had joined Pando in April 2012, a few months after Steve Jobs, the cofounder and CEO of Apple, died, and I found a tech world still grieving the loss of its superstar. The industry was bereft of a figure who could command the worlds attention with the twitch of a stage-managed eyebrow, a man who could send the media into conniptions with an addendum to a slide show. Silicon Valley was frantically searching for one more thing, but results had been mixed. The iPhone was by then status quo and the Great Innovators of the Valley had turned their attention to photo-sharing apps and ad optimization. Software engineers were earning millions to digitize aggregated attention and make it amenable to the distribution of newsfeed flyers. Other ideas failed to inspire. Facebook, but for small groups of people? Limos on demand, but for middle-class San Franciscans? Marissa Mayer, but for Yahoo!?

Then, in June 2012, the Tesla Model S came along. While it enjoyed a splendid launch party, the public didnt know much about it at first. The luxury electric sedan came with a $70,000 price tag, and that was just for the cheapest version. At the launch event, Tesla handed over the keys to only ten cars, with plans to scale up production later. Reviewers got ten-minute test drives. Still, it was enough to capture the imaginations of the auto and tech media. The Wall Street Journals Dan Neil compared the Model S to a Lamborghini and praised the marvel of its silent ride. Wired said it was a complete hoot to drive. The performance version of the car accelerated from zero to sixty miles per hour in 4.2 seconds. That was supercar territoryin a sedan.