Elon Musk Will Usher In the Era of Electric Cars 336
pigrabbitbear writes "There's a reason why Elon Musk is being called the next Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, he's a visionary, a super successful serial entrepreneur, having made his initial fortune with a company he sold to Compaq before starting Paypal. Like Jobs, he saved his beloved baby Tesla Motors from the brink of oblivion. Like Jobs, [he has] a knack for paradigm-shifting industry disruption. Which means he's also demanding. 'Like Jobs, Elon does not tolerate C or D players,' SpaceX board member and early Tesla investor Steve Jurvetson told BusinessWeek. But while Jobs was slinging multi-colored music players and touchable smartphones, Musk is building rocket ships and electric-powered supercars. It's why his friends describe him as not just Steve Jobs but also John D. Rockefeller and Howard Hughes all wrapped in one. His friend Jon Favreau used Musk as the real-life inspiration for the big screen version of Tony Stark. Elon Musk is a badass."
Presumably he'll also cure cancer, (Score:4, Interesting)
send us to Mars, usher in a new era of world peace, and while he's at it, make us all sandwiches?
How did this make it to the front page? It's not even a slashvertizement for a product; that might occasionally be useful. It's a slashvertizement for a person, that doesn't even have any useful information in it beyond "this person is awesome". It doesn't even make the slightest effort to argue the statement given in the title: I'd love to see an "era of electric cars" get ushered in.
Seriously?? (Score:4, Interesting)
where's that slashdot article that came up a couple of days ago, about velomobiles being 80x more efficient than electric cars? didn't it have some quite obvious maths that showed that if all cars in the USA were converted to electric, it would require 7,000 GWh of electricity just to charge them every day? what that velomobiles article didn't also cover is that it's highly unlikely that the world has enough lithium and neodymium to go round to supply all those vehicles.
i've *done* the analysis and the designs (http://lkcl.net/ev) and if EVs are to be the success that people really really WANT them to be, then they have to be ultra-efficient (350kg) ultra-streamlined (Cd 0.15) parallel diesel hybrids with a 5kW (7HP) diesel motor and a 10kW (13HP) electric motor running off of a CVT (quadbike) gearbox.
perhaps this is some sort of spiritual test of my patience when people make these kinds of statements "elon musk will be the next steve jobs for recommending that the world's population use more of our planet's natural resources than its humans can actually get hold of", or am i missing something here?
Re:Celebrity CEOs (Score:2, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Eberhard
Musk basically ripped the company out from under him.
Re:oh stop it (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:If somebody compared me... (Score:4, Interesting)
Small businesses no longer make up the majority of the economy [businessweek.com]. In boom times, they do very well. But during periods when expansion capital is hard to come by and sales are weak, they are much less competitive against larger companies who have significant cash/resources to fall back on. We've been in such a bad growth situation for small businesses for several years now, and there's no sign of it improving in the near future either.