WHERE THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD
Inside every Tesla, dominating the otherwise spartan dashboard and defining the car’s interior, is a screen. Specifically, a projected capacitive touchscreen that spans seventeen inches in the Model S and X and fifteen inches in the Model 3. When Tesla first debuted the Model S, nobody had ever seen a display that size in a production car dashboard before, and it was instrumental in establishing Tesla as a technology brand, rather than just another green car brand.
As Tesla has evolved into a unique cultural phenomenon, these enormous screens can be seen as more than just screens. They are a symbol that crystalizes the strengths and weaknesses of Tesla’s entire approach to cars, and they help explain why opinions on the company are so polarized.
At first glance, Tesla’s giant screen communicates the brand’s values on an aesthetic level. It tells the customer that this is as much a device as a car, and that Tesla is as much a high-tech company as it is an automaker. Though the screen is what catches the eye, the full aesthetic impact comes from what you don’t see: buttons and knobs. When compared to the interior of any other car, a Tesla’s clean, button-free touchscreen interface looks like an iPhone in a world of BlackBerrys.
Even the layout of the user interface recalls a smartphone or tablet, with menus and functions arrayed like apps on the periphery of the screen. It’s as fast and graphically rich as many smartphones, and you can use the same multitouch gestures you would with a smartphone or tablet, including swipes and pinch to zoom. After you’ve spent some time in a Tesla, the small size, clunky performance, and modest visuals of other vehicles’ more typical in-car touchscreens make you feel like you’ve traveled back in time.
The all-digital interface also reflects the centrality of software in Tesla’s vehicle design, something else it has picked up from modern consumer electronics. Without the constraints of a hardware interface, Tesla has far more scope to adjust and improve the user experience in its cars. Using over-the-air updates, Tesla can tweak the user interface and add new features without worrying about how it will be controlled. The infinite digital space of a screen and software opens new horizons of possibility that Tesla is still only just beginning to explore.
This flexibility enables one of the things that gives Tesla an entirely different character than other any car or car company: in-car “Easter eggs.” These digital tchotchkes are purposefully frivolous, turning the navigation screen into the surface of Mars or making the car displayed on the instrument cluster look like Santa’s sleigh. A “sketch pad” mode allows users to draw pictures using the central screen and “TeslAtari” mode turns the display into a classic arcade with playable old-school games like Lunar Lander and Missile Command. For all their absurdity, these Easter eggs push the boundaries of what a car can do and what a customer’s relationship with a car company can be.
All of these screen-enabled features are fundamental to Tesla’s deep appeal, if not to the actual usability of the vehicle itself. For a lot of fans (particularly the youngest), the quirky frivolity of the Easter eggs is the first thing they’ve ever cared about in a car, signaling that this inanimate object is as playful as they are and fostering a deep affinity with the brand. For serious techies, on the other hand, the fact that a Tesla is more software-centric and computer-like than other cars makes it intrinsically more relatable and appealing than any other vehicle.
At a time when uniqueness is harder than ever to come by in an auto market full of century-old companies and brands, these are distinct advantages. Once upon a time, consumers would have to do extensive research to make sure that they bought a car that was appealing, affordable, and reliable. Now that all cars are competitively benchmarked to the point of homogeneity, the hardest task car buyers face is not avoiding a lemon but picking a car that stands out from the crowd. Tesla’s gigantic screens, the brand image it projects, and the things it enables easily solve that problem for anyone who can afford it.
The uniqueness of Tesla’s screens also presents a rarely considered question: If intense competition has led automakers to make sure their cars have the same features as everyone else’s, and Tesla’s screen is a standout, where is the competition for Tesla’s screen? Why haven’t other car companies offered seventeen-inch touchscreens, either before the Model S or since?
One trite answer is that Tesla is a Silicon Valley disruptor, and as such, it is simply more technologically advanced than the lumbering auto-industry dinosaurs. But for anyone who looks beyond this meaningless tautology, a totally different perspective on Tesla awaits.
The key to answering this question comes from Elon Musk himself, when he told Ashlee Vance about the seventeen-inch screen that made the Model S so distinctive. “When we first talked about the touchscreen, the guys came back and said ‘there’s nothing like that in the automotive supply chain,’” he explains in Vance’s book. “I said ‘I know. That’s because it’s never been put in a fucking car before.’” But, the story goes, Musk figured that since laptops are robust enough to endure drops, heat, and other abuse, it wouldn’t be too hard to make one stand up to the conditions it would see in a car.
However, Vance writes:
After contacting the laptop suppliers, Tesla’s engineers came back and said that the temperature and vibration loads for the computers did not appear to be up to automotive standards. Tesla’s supplier in Asia also kept pointing the carmaker to its automotive division instead of its computing division. As Musk dug into the situation more, he discovered that the laptop screens simply had not been tested before under tougher automotive conditions, which included large temperature fluctuations. When Tesla performed the tests, the electronics ended up working just fine.
It’s not clear what tests Tesla subjected its screens to when qualifying them for use in their cars, but we do know that the Innolux G170J1-LE1 they use in Model S and X is an industrial screen whose initial specs were not up to basic “automotive grade” standards. Located under a large glass roof, and with multiple processors and a heater core packed behind it in the dash, Tesla put the G170J1-LE1 in a thermal sandwich it wasn’t designed for. A car’s dashboard can reach the screen’s 80 degrees Celsius (176 degrees Fahrenheit) maximum operating temperature, even without help from the processors needed to power the infotainment and Autopilot or extra solar radiation from a glass roof.
Sure enough, Tesla owners have reported problems with their seventeen-inch displays that strongly suggest chronic thermal overload. In 2012–2015 Teslas, an adhesive in the screens would soften in high heat, forming bubbles around the edge of the display and eventually leaking out into the cabin. As soon as that problem was addressed in production, owners reported yellow bands forming around the edge of screens in 2016 and later Teslas, another issue that is almost certainly tied to high heat. By December 2018, Tesla owners were reporting that the company would not replace screens until it developed a new version, sometime during the summer of 2019.
Ironically, this yellow banding/border issue is just another way in which Tesla’s vehicles are like smartphones and tablets. Yellow border problems of various kinds have been reported on devices like Apple iPhones and Microsoft Surface Books and others, but they’re a bigger deal on a six-figure car than a three-figure device. Not only are quality expectations higher for cars, with repair costs ranging from about $1,000 for the screen alone and about $3,000 for the entire infotainment module, the out-of-warranty costs are much higher. For Tesla, these problems not only hurt customer satisfaction, but they hurt the company’s thin (at best) operating margins as well.
Once you start to look beyond the gee-whiz factor of a car that resembles a smartphone and start thinking about the kinds of problems that smartphones have, the whole idea becomes less appealing. On one hand, the steady flow of new features and software updates seems like such an obvious improvement of cars. Yet on the other, this can also make cars as unstable and finicky as smartphones, which are prone to bugs and glitches. Rebooting your phone because a website made it crash is no big deal, but what if a website or a software update made your car computer crash or reboot while you’re driving? What if a website made your odometer fail to properly record mileage, effectively causing you to commit inadvertent odometer fraud? (Tesla drivers have reported both things on forums.)
Launching a “minimum viable product” and then updating it after you’ve started selling it works for software and even smartphones, provided they are not relied upon in safety-critical situations. But the reason automakers choose to use proven technology and automotive-grade components, and then spend years validating them before selling to customers, is that cars are fundamentally safety-critical systems. When you start to think about the numbers—about 1.25 million people die on roads around the world every year, nearly forty thousand of them in the United States alone—it becomes easier to understand why automakers don’t “beta test” on their customers.
The inherent danger of driving is also why other automakers haven’t fully eliminated buttons and knobs to make their cars look more like smartphones. Unlike a phone, the ability to operate a car’s controls without looking at them can be a matter of life and death. If BlackBerry’s physical keyboard offered an advantage for users (an equivalent of the knobs and buttons in our cars that let us turn down the heat or turn up a song while still watching the road), it would almost certainly still be around. Even though eliminating buttons and knobs could save automakers massive amounts of money and give their cars a dash of smartphone cool, for most automakers those advantages aren’t worth the risk of an interface that requires drivers to take their eyes off the road.
Besides, even Teslas still don’t have the feature that helped smartphones become indispensable: apps. At the reveal of the Model S prototype, Elon Musk told Tesla investor and board member Steve Jurvetson that “we’ve got people, like, writing apps for the car,” but currently there’s no sign of a Tesla app store. Without independent developers coming up with unique software applications for Tesla’s cars, cars will never have the creative and financial engine that made the smartphone what it is today. Even for Tesla, the risks of opening up vehicle code to third parties is just too high.
Making cars more like smartphones is one of those ideas that sounds appealing in theory, but it keeps running into the same inconvenient reality: cars are not smartphones. Now, most people would probably agree that they don’t need or want their car to do the same things their phone does. So if making cars into smartphones doesn’t make much sense, why has Tesla been so successful doing just that?
History holds the answer. People today respond to Tesla’s smartphone-inspired looks for the same reason that cars in the 1920s borrowed cues from streamliner trains, or cars in the 1950s were slathered with tail fins, fake intakes, and other references to jet aircraft. By aligning the look and feel of its products with the symbology and logic of the high-tech sector, Tesla has associated itself with the transformative change that smartphones have wrought on nearly every aspect of our lives.
The question that these trends always pose is: How far do we let the automotive cosplay take us? Are we so obsessed with the newest technology that we will go beyond cosmetic elements like tail fins and waste fortunes trying to develop actual jet-powered cars before we concede they are too loud, polluting, and pavement-melting to actually be a good idea? (Absurd as it sounds, Chrysler spent a quarter century and $100 million on precisely that, and the Environmental Protection Agency kicked in an extra $19 million in taxpayer money.)
There’s no doubt that the technologies that gave us smartphones are changing cars and will continue to do so, even creating a diverse range of new alternatives to cars. But there’s also a significant difference between technology for the sake of technology and technology that is applied to real problems. Is Tesla really solving a problem, or is the entire company like the giant screen in its cars: a shiny object that’s perfectly designed to tap into the hopes and anxieties of our particular historical moment and not much else?
The answer depends entirely on your view of Elon Musk who, like Tesla’s screens, inspires profoundly different perspectives. To his fans, Musk is a rare example of a truly altruistic genius in public life, a hero at a time when heroes seem less common than ever. To his detractors, Musk cynically uses environmentalism to sell cars, secure subsidies, and deflect criticism. If you believe one of these things or the other, the chances of you changing your mind are not good.
It is possible, however, to fairly objectively assess Tesla’s environmental impact. The company claims that its cars have collectively offset about four million tons of carbon. That figure is on the generous side, considering that it is based on the assumption that every Tesla vehicle is always powered by zero carbon power when even the company’s own Superchargers aren’t all zero-emission. That’s a drop in the bucket, considering that the world emitted some 37 billion tons of carbon in 2018 alone.
But the real problem with Tesla’s image as an environmental cause is the cost of that impact. To hit that four-million-ton carbon reduction, Tesla has had to raise no less than $19 billion in capital from private and public markets. That puts the price of its environmental contribution at $4,750 per ton of carbon, or an order of magnitude higher than the $417 per ton recently calculated as the “social cost of carbon.” It also makes almost every other form of carbon reduction look like a screaming deal, including carbon capture for fossil-fuel power plants (up to $600 per ton), building advanced nuclear plants ($59 per ton), and a home weatherization assistance program ($350 per ton).
In short, if Tesla were a government carbon-reduction program, it would be indefensible on a cost-benefit basis. And unless it eventually generates enough profits to repay that $19 billion plus a reasonable return, the traditional private market justifications don’t really work out either. Investing in Tesla might be reasonably seen as a long-shot bet on its autonomous-drive technology proving to be a moneymaker, but even that doesn’t fully explain the deep financial and emotional support that Tesla enjoys.
As the evidence propping up Tesla’s mythology fades under increasing scrutiny, many of its fans have simply dug in, reinforcing their emotional attachment to the company and its controversial leader. Their love of their car, their faith in the technological progress it represents, their need for a hero to look up to, and the generally low bar set for public figures all protect their deep faith in Tesla and Musk. Since the core of Musk’s appeal is his willingness to take on any and all odds, it’s not surprising that even the most warranted adversity and criticism only makes his fans love him all the more.
At the same time, as the number of Teslas on the road has grown, the company has increasingly had to contend with customers who aren’t true believers but simply want the coolest car out there. As their high expectations and high monthly payments collide with Tesla’s poor quality and worse service, they aren’t making the excuses or demonstrating the forbearance of Tesla’s hard-core early adopter fan base. Tesla’s base of support might be solid as a rock, but that base doesn’t seem to be growing like it once did.
These customers represent the market force that has shaped the auto industry into what it is today. They may want tail fins or a huge smartphone-like touchscreen when it’s cool, but not at the expense of a vehicle that reliably gets them from point A to point B and a customer experience that doesn’t require an almost religious faith in the company or its CEO. The aesthetics, performance, and image that Tesla brings to cars are appealing, but the boring reliability and ubiquitous dealerships of the established players are necessary beyond a small, premium niche.
For a certain segment, Tesla has a deep, unwavering appeal. But the company struggles to broaden that appeal to a more pragmatic mass market. At this point, the major looming threat to Tesla as a company is the thing that killed most of the hundreds of defunct car companies: an economic recession. Tesla didn’t have a significant manufacturing operation in 2008, and even so it only survived by the skin of its teeth. Another downturn would not only do to Tesla what it does to every car company, cutting demand and turning its operational footprint into a financial anchor, but it would also put immense pressure on those who have been investing in the company’s altruistic mission rather than hard financial results.
If Tesla survives the next downturn, it will have passed the fundamental test of an automaker. If it doesn’t, it might be bought, where the brand would live on as part of one of the major automakers. The company’s future increasingly comes down to its bold bet on “Full Self-Driving” technology, which could theoretically create massive demand for its cars if they deliver on the promise to earn a healthy cashflow for owners (and Tesla) as robotaxis. As ambivalent as ever about the traditionally low-margin business of manufacturing and selling cars, Tesla’s ongoing commitment to self-driving technology seems like a last-ditch bid to achieve profits that match its heady valuation.
Having built such a powerful brand, one way that Tesla could survive is by abandoning Musk’s original master plan and committing to a small-volume, high-margin luxury strategy. Failing that, it could sell itself or partner with an established player to improve its manufacturing quality and service footprint. Neither of these things would take away from the fact that Tesla has already accomplished its mission of accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles, but both of them would be admissions that Musk’s vision and leadership has limits.
The fact that this hasn’t happened yet adds to the growing evidence that Tesla exists to serve Musk above all else. Ever since he first complained about being left out of a New York Times story back in 2006, his centrality to the company’s identity has grown deeper. When the board of directors bowed to his threat to leave the company if they didn’t “extol his integrity” in the wake of the SEC charging him with fraud, it seemed that Tesla had reached the point of no return.
Given Musk’s increasing unpredictability, it’s impossible to say what he will do next. Only one thing is certain: Tesla no longer has a sense of identity independent of Musk, and it will be dragged along on any adventure he finds himself drawn into. Once you select Ludicrous Mode, it seems there is no going back.