Saturday, November 30, 2019
Ed misses a point, sort of
Ed Niedermeyer, as always, gives a deep and coherent set of thoughts....
We still have a collective memory of a time when cars were created by go-with-your-gut auteurs like Musk, in the form of classic cars that make modern cars and automakers look banal and bureaucratic. What Musk is selling is the fantasy that we can (or should) return to that era.
I think he's missing a subtle but important point.
The 'auteurs' who succeeded were working for big companies that already had many lines of profitable non-fantastic cars. The Corvette and Mustang were irrational cars built from a base of sturdy reliable economy cars. The original Corvette was mostly '53 Chevy, down to the 235 six and Powerglide. The original Mustang was a fancified Falcon. Development was relatively easy because there wasn't much new. Most of the package had been produced and tested in huge quantities for many years.
The auteurs who were more like Elon (in a corporate sense) went the other way, toward too much rationality. The Everyman's Car was the universal auteur fantasy. It always failed because Everyman's Car is a used car. You can't make a real car cheap enough for Everyman to buy new.
Elon is going both ways. His explicit appeal is strictly numerical and precise because his intended audience is autists, not auteurs. His cultists are thrilled by the performance numbers and carbon footprint numbers. Even the CYBERTRK appeals strictly to numberoids. It's not an organic shape like real cars; it's an abstract Euclidean heptagon. It's beautiful to Plato, not to Aristotle.
¶ 3:40 PM 
