NEWS FROM THE FUTURE: The secret of electric car success

Futureworld brings you Mindbullets: News from the Future, to spark strategic thinking about leadership, innovation and digital disruption. These fictitious scenarios aim to challenge conventional mindsets and promote understanding of the future context for business. 

Dateline: November 3 2030

As is so often the case, the least visible part of an innovative product can be the most important when it comes to commercial success and market demand. For 100 years, cars attracted attention mainly because of what was under the hood — the engine.

But electric cars are different. Nobody cares about electric motors. They’re all efficient. Their hidden special feature is the battery. And that’s why early electric cars were such abject failures — they didn’t have the juice to perform like a real car.

Just like the first cellphones, 80% of the innovation needed to make you market leader was about the battery. Not just for marketing — range and performance are important — but for affordability and profitability. And to dominate sales and production of electric cars you have to dominate battery tech too.

Elon Musk and Tesla knew this. That's why they pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into battery development and the Gigafactories to produce them at scale. It was the only way they could achieve their ambitious mission to be global leader in the industry they created.

The typical home solar battery is 5kWh while the average car battery is 50kWh, 10 times as many cells required for cars. That’s where all the capacity is going and why it’s critical to have your own production facilities or dedicated supplies to be the big gorilla in sustainable motoring. Which is why Musk also bought into mining companies.

Now Tesla is on target to ship almost 20-million vehicles this year — more than half of all electrics and up to 30% of all cars globally. And it’s all thanks to their obsession with batteries.

Tesla is the new Toyota, and battery metals are the new oil.

• First published on Mindbullets November 3 2022

Tesla reaps the whirlwind

Fuel crisis sends demand for solar and EVs soaring

Dateline: June 4 2025

In 2022, Tesla stock lost almost half its value in the big sell-off that saw sky-high valuations questioned. Triggered by inflation fear and a tightening Federal Reserve, blue-chip tech stocks like Alphabet, Apple and Amazon also saw their prices tumble, as investors took a more cautious approach to earnings forecasts.

But the Ukraine war and resultant squeeze on oil and gas supplies — and prices — did more than fuel inflation. As always happens when the prices of base commodities shoot up, alternatives begin to look a lot more attractive. With petrol hitting $7.50 a gallon at the pumps, an electric car becomes more than just a way to combat climate change. And Tesla is by far the leading EV manufacturer.

Tesla’s other business is solar panels, solar roofs, and the batteries to back them up. Surging demand for electric cars has also spurred demand for charging stations, and Tesla makes them too. Smart homes and company campuses with solar roofs and parking lots, battery storage, and grid interconnection are helping to balance out the energy crunch.

Central to Tesla’s rampant share price has been its ability to overcome supply constraints of critical materials such as nickel and lithium, enabling it to triple battery and car production, and shorten delivery times from more than a year to just a few weeks. With every Gigafactory globally operating at near capacity, Tesla’s dominance of the electric vehicle market is assured.

Fans and investors who supported the company’s stock in its first leap to $1,000 almost five years ago were proved right. It’s not about the fundamentals or the valuation; it’s the vision for the future — and the ability to create it — that makes a company a quantum outperformer.

• First published on Mindbullets June 2 2022

• Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.