A Detroit Native is Ashamed of their lack of innovation compared to Musk

Detroit: Looking Bad by Comparison


As a child growing up in Detroit, I thought the Big Three automakers (There was still the Little Fourth, American Motors, and even the tiny fifth, Studebaker) could do no wrong.
I thought they were on top of it-- that they picked and chose from new technology what they needed and the rest of the world was in awe of us.
Then the foreign car invasion came and I saw there was other ways of doing things.
Detroit slowly brought in some foreign ideas--disc brakes, independent rear suspensions, fiberglass bodies (but only for the Corvette) air cooled engines (but only for the Corvair) but it became glaringly obvious that we are building cars that the rest of the world thought wasteful and irrelevant. Where you could find Mercedes dealerships all over the US, there weren't , say, Buick dealerships all over Europe,
So then 13years ago, along comes a spoiler, Elon Musk. Out of South Africa from his second country, Canada. I just read a biography
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
by Ashlee Vance and am stunned by Musk's ability to approach a field whose leaders have been dead set in their ways, analyze the situation and cut to the chase.
He did it simultaneously in two fields, rocketry and cars. In rocketry one of his big things was reusable rockets--send it out into space and have it come back so you can re-use it. In cars, the Tesla created a market where the Big Three thought there wasn't one. Detroit rationalized , thinking why bother making a big effort with electric car sales in the US with electric cars being such a tiny percentage of overall sales? But he went for it , pedal to the metal, to dominate that percentage.
He saw it as not just a race for market share in the US but in the whole world and now there's certain countries where Tesla has the dominant share of electric car sales and Tesla cars are being built in China and Germany.
Maybe the word "disenchantment" is how I think of Detroit now--where I once thought those executives, who live in fine homes in Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe--were geniuses, Now, after reading Musk's life story, I realize how they've been dragging their heels, telling us we were "world class" when Detroit's products were provincial.
I think they need courses on Musk Business Philosophy to be taught in Colleges. Not the technology-- that's changing constantly --(like moving toward solid state batteries) but his approach toward a new field and how, time after time, he sees what the obstacles are, removes them, and simplifies the building of a highly complex product.
On You Tube there is a compilation called Best of Autopilot FSD predicts Crash Compilation 2020. Teslacam stories #16. Watch it and you see things Detroit can only dream about.

And so it is. The American auto industry moves into a new year with this gadget and that (heated seats! 3-way tailgates!) but Tesla is moving in a different world. And if Space X makes more money than Tesla, what really hurts is the realization that Tesla is just Elon Musk's side job!
I hope American high schools and colleges can grasp the Musk approach to a problem --how he cuts to the chase--and figure out how to teach it as a business philosophy. Because Detroit's way was good for the 20th century but flat isn't cutting it anymore....
What say you?