The establishment vs Uber

[Kevin]

PS. As for the patent thing... I think it's more akin to why many startup dot com's start out as "a great deal" and figure out the profit thing later. It's better to get a billion loyal customers first, then move into asking them for a reasonable price later. Right now for Tesla, they have the Ferrari model. Owning one is a status thing, more than practical. In order for Tesla to sell many more affordable cars, they need more competition to drive down the price. I think what they are looking for is for their technology to become more ubiquitous. You can sell more VHS tapes when most people have VHS players. What would hurt Tesla would be if Ford or Toyota established a standard that made Tesla an odd duck. You'd need to consider not only the higher price of the vehicle, but also the difficulty in finding a compatible charging station, and the higher price for maintenance and repair (just like Ferrari in that regard as well).

I'm continuing the tangent, but that was my first thought too. Telsa released the patents because they need others on board with their system so that the infrastructure gets built out to support it. I think most people realize that is one of the biggest factors holding back electric cars. If you never leave the 100 mile radius around your home, they're great. But people like to take road trips, made possible by pretty much never being more than 50 miles from a fuel station.

So either the basic battery design needs to be able to charge in 5 - 10 minutes off of the current grid with nothing special, just a lot of 120 or 240 outlets and meters to regulate it and charge people. Or lots of parties have to be making things with the current designs that require a fair bit of special infrastructure to charge things quickly to get the number of "fuel" stations that people need.

The same major issue applies to Hydrogen fueling. That actually requires less changes to vehicles, it would actually be possible to retrofit existing vehicles depending on just how you were using the hydrogen, but there are currently 12 hydrogen fueling stations in the country and 10 of those are in California. ( http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/stations_counts.html ).

It's not an impossible hurdle but standardization would certainly make clearing it easier, a lot more entities could get onto the playing field.

Of course if we all just had the jetpacks we were promised would be here 20+ years ago....