30 April

Why do I post so much about Tesla? They don't talk about the enormity of what they've done. You don't need to be any sort of fan to appreciate it, it will change the world, all of the world (well beyond cars) and it's only slowly dawning on others how they're doing it. We usually think of cars as mechanical devices with certain properties. Tesla threw that idea away. Tesla sees cars as part of a vast knowledge/data landscape. They're at the centre of our lives and therefore of a vast ocean of information, almost none of which the car industry has ever used, or even realised. GPS navigation was only a tiny step towards liberating data from our car universes (and it had enormous business and social impact). Tesla goes MUCH further. It doesn't think of cars individually, it sees them as part of a networked fleet of other vehicles. The data their vehicles collect every second is able to analysed, fed into models and then returned to *all* vehicles in a fleet for upgrades. That means the learning of what happens even to only one car can be shared with millions of others. The whole fleet gets smarter, continuously. But they also see their cars themselves not as nuts and bolts, but as made of knowledge too. They constantly change them physically using their huge R&D and data from the cars in use. Tesla transforms the world into a continuously enriching ecosystem of knowledge. This is still only the tip of the iceberg.