We're All Stars Now, in the Musk Show
Off-Ramps for 28 November 2024
Welcome to Off-Ramps! We have a special feature today: Musk Week! I’ll highlight four interesting pieces about the man and his firms that I think you will appreciate reading. Please enjoy these on your morning commute, or save them for your weekend.
Why Musk? Because he’s inescapable.
He runs Tesla, the most prominent American manufacturer of electric vehicles, and aspires to make his cars wholly automated.
He runs SpaceX, and just oversaw the successful capture of a rocket the size of a 40-storey building out of the sky with a pair of metal ‘chopsticks’.
He runs X and uses the platform to send his posts to all users, giving his views incredible reach.
He is a confidant of newly-elected President Trump, and has been put in charge of an exercise to make government more efficient, and/or produce dank memes; no one seems to be sure how any of it will work.
If we look a century from now, which companies operating today have the best chance of being remembered then, given their field, lead, and potential? The two I think of are SpaceX and OpenAI. Musk is the founder and CEO of the former, and was an early investor in the latter (though the relationship has ended in tears.)
I’ve written about Musk extensively:
He founded Hyperloop, which was clearly unworkable from its inception, and promoted it for a decade
He wants Tesla to become a robotaxi company, which, I have argued, will not be a success
He launched the Tesla Cybercab in a fashion that was long on hype and short on detail
Today I’ll point you to stories about Musk and Tesla from others, all of which are context for future news you will be hearing about Musk: his activities at Tesla, the U.S. government, and beyond.
Musk Is Not Stupid; Please Don’t Pretend Otherwise
Let’s begin with important context. Musk often promises things he doesn’t, and sometimes even can’t, deliver. He can be childish, vindictive, and crass. He has poor impulse control.
But, as Jeremiah Johnson notes, he’s not stupid:
Probably the single biggest piece of cope running in left-of-center political circles today is the idea that Elon Musk isn’t a genius. He’s just lucky, or evil, or he’s incredibly rich, famous and successful for some other reasons. He steals other people’s work and takes credit. He was born to rich parents. He was just in the right place at the right time. His father owned an emerald mine!
This is an incredibly sad exercise. Every single person who contorts themselves to explain how Elon isn’t brilliant ends up making themselves look like a jealous idiot. Musk helped create not one, not two, but THREE separate businesses worth more than $100 billion. That does not happen just because you’re a mustachio-twirling villain who steals other people’s ideas. If founding billion dollar companies was as easy as finding a cool idea and swindling someone else while they do the work for you, everyone would be doing it.
That does not happen because of ‘luck’. It does not happen because your parents had a few million dollars... It does not happen because you were ‘in the right place at the right time’. Electric cars and space were typically thought of as terrible industries where profits were impossible before Elon revolutionized them.
But he frequently does stupid things:
On the other hand, Elon is frequently an idiot. He is constantly making confident proclamations about subjects he seems to not understand at all… he seems alternately bumbling, naïve, and idiotic when trying to deal with softer or more human fields. His views of the war in Ukraine are childish. He’s terrible at PR to a comical degree. He doesn’t understand social dynamics…
As Johnson notes, he’s far from the only person who is a bright star in one field who comes to think that every thought they have is gold. He mentions Ben Carson; I might add Jonas Salk, Henry Ford, or P.G. Wodehouse. It’s a common condition, and we should recognize it as such.
But few seem to. I am frequently exhausted by the Musk fans who get angry or offended when I point out his hucksterism or misunderstandings, which has happened a few times since I started this newsletter. But I am also annoyed by the anti-Musk brigade, who assign him every vice because they don’t like his politics or his affect.
I respect Musk’s genuinely world-historical achievements, capabilities, and vision, while deploring his many missteps. I encourage my readers to do the same.
Musk Can Get Better AV Regulation in Place
Bloomberg has reported that the incoming Trump administration wants its Department of Transportation to prioritize “a federal framework for fully self-driving vehicles”. What does that mean? Tim Lee has the goods.
He writes:
At the federal level, automotive safety is governed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has written regulations called the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS). The FMVSS governs almost every safety-related aspect of vehicle design: brakes, seat belts, headlights, windshields, and so forth… The FMVSS, which has been around since the 1960s, doesn’t have any specific rules for self-driving cars. But it assumes that cars will have human drivers—and hence steering wheels, accelerator and brake pedals, side and rear-view mirrors, and so forth… it’s probably not possible for a vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals to comply with the FMVSS as currently written. And that’s a problem for companies that are planning to build and deploy such vehicles.
What that means is that while it’s legally possible to deploy self-driving cars, they must consist of software packages installed on conventionally-framed vehicles. This is what Waymo and Cruise are doing now.
Importantly, though, both companies once imagined deploying custom vehicles, with interior space optimized for self-driving. But the Waymo Firefly was killed in 2017 and the Cruise Origin earlier this year; the fact that neither could be deployed on public streets absent a difficult process to get regulatory approval surely factored into those decisions.
Now, of course, Tesla wants to build a Cybercab without a steering wheel. It seems plausible that getting such designs street-legal is a Trump priority only because Elon wants it. The irony is, as I’ve noted before, this would benefit Zoox far more than Tesla, because Zoox, which already has a steering-wheel-free vehicle ready to go, is capable of succeeding in this arena and Tesla isn’t.
Still, whatever the effect on individual companies, I think that the self-driving revolution depends on new form factors for vehicles (something I will be writing about early next year) and I’ll be pleased if American regulations permit this, however that sausage ends up getting made.
Teslas Are Dangerously Flawed
That said, not all innovation in automotive form factor is good, and some bad innovations are entirely permitted by the regulations we do have.
A case in point: Tesla vehicle doors are opened and closed electronically.
The Tesla design philosophy leans into futuristic aesthetics: smooth lines, aerodynamism, technology. Accordingly, the doors are powered. When you pull the handle, an electronic system slightly retracts the window from its trim, and extends it again when the door closes. Speaking as the owner of a Model 3, this is certainly satisfying.
But it’s also dangerous, because if the vehicle suffers catastrophic damage such that the power is lost, the doors can’t be easily opened. Rear-seat passengers in a Model Y need to lift up the carpet to find the manual release for the doors. Model S and X passengers will need to remove the speaker grille on the door (I hope they have tools and the wherewithal to use them). Model 3 passengers have no manual release at all; they will have to pull the seat down, crawl into the trunk, and use the manual release for the rear hatch.
That may sound amusing, unless you understand that the likeliest cause of a severe power failure is a road incident, which can also cause the vehicle to ignite. In such situations, given the difficulty of accessing the manual release, passengers often burn to death.
This happened a few weeks ago in Toronto, which is only the most recent incident. Phil Koopman is keeping track of others.
As he writes:
This is stunningly bad human interface design. It is entirely unreasonable to expect an ordinary car owner to know where a hidden/non-obvious emergency control is and activate it when they are trapped inside a burning car. Possibly using a tool they don’t have available. Let alone passengers. Apparently without mandatory training and mandatory periodic refresher training.
The one survivor of the Toronto crash made it out because a bystander smashed the rear-door window open. If you take an Uber or Lyft trip in a Tesla, please be prepared to do the same, from the inside.
Ah, le mot juste
Because we all need to improve our mood after that story, let’s end on the lighter side. For as long as there have been cars, we’ve used them to signal to others about our tastes, class, and status. But for many of us, that’s not enough! We’re unique individuals (just like everyone else) and our cars need to showcase that uniqueness.
Enter the bumper sticker, the tattoo of the automotive world.
Everything is political now, which means driving a Tesla means affiliating oneself with the CEO, Elon Musk. (Or it looks like you might be affiliating yourself with him; but I repeat myself.)
If that’s you, and you’re embarrassed by the valence of your conspicuous consumption, or you just want to proudly drive a (sustainable! electric!) car while dunking on (annoying! problematic!) Elon, there is a solution: that’s buying an anti-Musk bumper sticker. As per this article (for which a hat-tip to Reilly Brennan), business is booming:
Matthew Hiller, the guy behind the viral "I Bought This Before We Knew Elon Was Crazy" sticker… first launched the Tesla stickers in January 2023. "And now, at this point, it's gone insane," he told Heatmap. Sales hit record highs several times this year, he said, including after Musk's appearance at a Trump rally. They skyrocketed the day after the election—with 250-300 orders that day—and have remained healthy ever since. "I can barely keep up," Hiller said.
$7.50 is a good price for keeping your status anxiety at bay. Better buy two!