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Vivek Wadhwa on Being a Tesla Fanboy | Big Think.


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·Nov 4, 2024

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I call myself a Tesla fanboy. I've been driving a Tesla for a year. It's to the point that I can't drive regular vehicles anymore. If you recall the first time you got an iPod, it was amazing, wasn't it? You went from a cassette player to this amazing little device on which everything was "solid state.” You remember solid state electronics and so on? But this amazing advance we saw in technology, that's what it feels like to drive a Tesla.

I call it a spaceship that travels on land. No gears, no bumps, you step on the accelerator, the car literally flies and it flies so fast that when my wife is sitting with me she complains, “Vivek, we just had dinner. Please, I'm going to throw up if you go like that.” Because it feels like you're getting into warp speed. The car literally seamlessly picks up torque like you won't believe and flies.

This is the future of the transportation industry that we're going to have clean vehicles that fly. That's the magic of electric. Now what's holding back this industry is the cost of batteries. Knowing Elon Musk, he's going to far exceed his anticipated 30 percent savings by 2017.

I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of this decade we're talking about batteries costing a fifth as much as they do today, if not a fifth maybe a third, which means that it becomes more economical to produce electric clean vehicles which are like spaceships than to deal with the filthy internal combustion engines that we're dealing with right now — these machines that we put that horrible liquid into, that explosive liquid called petroleum, and then you have to load them up with that black viscous liquid called oil, pollute the environment.

These cars are as clunky as hell. Those internal combustion engines, it's time for them to go. We need to replace them with electric engines, and this is why I've become such a Tesla fanboy because it's the first real electric vehicle that is better than anything else ever made...

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