Lei on Tesla: Elon Musk is a cool classmate

Last month, I went to the United States, in order to hold the Gmic conference in Silicon Valley. Gmic is the global mobile Internet conference, in recent years, the mobile internet has been a hot spot in the global internet industry. But in Silicon Valley, you will find that the hottest Silicon Valley star is not in this circle, but in the electric car, his name Elon Musk, doing is very cool. I went to the United States two times this year, I went there in July, and October was the second. Twice I went to visit Elon Musk. Meeting with other Silicon Valley bosses to talk about different business topics, I went to see Elon Musk is purely for the interest of: This man is really amazing almost "anti-common sense." I'm interested in Musk's Tesla car because it's something that we average people can imagine compared to his other plans. The auto industry is a traditional industry, the industry has the Giants can not be big companies, why can a new company from the industry rise? Last year, when the company valued 4 billion dollars, Tesla a market value of $3 billion. Today, Tesla has a market capitalisation of more than 20 billion dollars. This year, Tesla's shares soared from more than 30 dollars/shares to a maximum of 190 dollars/shares. I went to visit Elon Musk with great curiosity and, incidentally, took a test drive to Tesla, an electric car. Electric cars have long been stale, and many car companies are developing electric cars. But it seems to me that the most important thing about Tesla is that it uses an intelligent system, and the vehicle is highly intelligent. It is full of smart devices that control cars with a touch screen equivalent to two large ipad sizes, including open skylight ah, air-conditioning ah, multimedia system Ah, navigation ah what, driving all the path data real-time feedback to the cloud, the server can help you carry your car, prompts the problem, the whole real-time monitoring, intelligent control. Especially when the big screen is in there, it's a sense of technology to open the navigation. Now each of our high-end cars may have a so-called intelligent system, but the current level of most of the control of a stereo and so on, not very useful. From the perspective of intelligence, Tesla and other automotive design thinking and functional services to achieve horizontal contrast, is the mobile Internet applications and stand-alone local computing performance. I saw a lot of comments on the internet that said: "Tesla is nothing, is not the electric car?" Toyota's oil and electricity mix quickly out of the fourth generation, can only say that Toyota than Musk will do marketing. "In fact, if you've never seen a Tesla car, it's really hard to have an intuitive picture of how cool this whole smart car is." Elon Musk, unlike many Silicon Valley heroes, is a good student, graduating from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and having a double degree in economics and BS in Physics. Elon Musk, like many Silicon Valley heroes, decided to drop out of school when he was studying for his PhD. Well, you see, America is weird, like a lot of great projects.Must let a university student read half, then drop out of work, can do the earth-shattering. 70 's Bill Gates yes, the 90 's Jerry Yang is also, the 2000 's Zuckerberg is also. Anyway, Elon Musk dropped out of school. Then he planned three things to do: the Internet, clean energy, space. The next thing we all know, he co-founded with people PayPal, and then sold, let himself become rich, he almost at the same time founded SpaceX and Tesla Motors. What's even cooler is that these two were supposed to be in the company of the imagination and have been quite successful by now. Curious about Musk's miraculous successes, I went to see him and asked him three questions. The first question: Everyone is worried about your car crash. Yes, modern intelligent systems do not have a crash, just the probability size. Musk said, the crash does not matter, restart is good. He said the vehicle's direction control system still uses the traditional electric control system, still quite reliable. Intelligent Systems control things more about the entire vehicle's information system, such as maps, navigation, multimedia, window control and so on. The driving control itself has not yet been handed over to the computer. Second, he has repeatedly pondered the plan to emigrate to Mars. I asked him what was the biggest difficulty in migrating to Mars. Musk says it is the recycling of energy. If the energy is not recycled, you can't survive on Mars. The third question is, brother, you've been a rocket, a dry car, a solar-powered city, and a very unreliable "Hyperloop", said from San Francisco to Los Angeles, he can make a very high-speed train, make a pipe, the train is like a capsule in the pipeline running, Up to 1287 kilometers per hour, is now 4 times times the speed of high-speed rail. He announced the whole plan and he made the plan open source. Of course, musk this person is not a visionary, his proposal must have some kind of feasibility. People have done rockets and made them, right. So I said, you have done the earth-shattering thing, what's the next big thing to do? "I'm going to focus on doing all three things," he said. "It's also focused ... Well, that's awesome. I asked him, these three things have been focused on the dry, what do you want to do? Musk says he might want to be a plane if he finishes three things in 10 years and has energy. He thinks airplanes need to change. There is no doubt that Musk is today's hottest Silicon Valley hero. Industry has recognized that he is today's most popular Silicon Valley hero. Tesla not only made rapid valuations, but also defeated several big-car giants in the market, including Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi. In the North American market, the first quarter of this year about 4,750 buyers selected Tesla Model S car, the same period of choice Mercedes-Benz S-Class customers only 3077, choose BaoThe 7-Series customer is 2338, while the Audi A8 has only 1462 customers. Why is Tesla able to achieve stunning results in the giant-lined auto industry? The electric-car companies that the US government has been heavily supporting have almost ended their miserable fate. Why Fisker and other pioneers have fallen, but only Tesla can survive and rapid development, but also known as the automotive industry apple? As a newcomer in a mature industry, he has no way to make a quality product with the cheapest price, nor does he have the capital to be the most expensive car in the world to conquer customers. So Musk chose a direction for Tesla: the sports car. First of all, Tesla car speed from zero to hundred kilometers faster than the fastest 3.7 seconds, which in itself is the technical advantages of pure motor-driven cars, compared with the predecessors of several electric vehicles, Elon musk cattle in this unique sharp market strategy. The average car in the United States sells 20,000 dollars, 25,000 dollars is good, the equivalent of three hundred thousand or four hundred thousand of our cars here. The average person drives the car. But that battery is going to add 20,000 to 30,000 dollars, the whole car will be forty thousand or fifty thousand dollars, forty thousand or fifty thousand dollars that are BMW Mercedes class, who buy your Tesla? New energy, all smart, and really popular before it was all gimmick, consumers can pay for gimmicks, but limited. The cheapest Tesla are 60,000 or 70,000, and a better one is a hundred thousand of. So he had to anchor those a hundred thousand of sports cars. Why didn't the electric cars of other companies sell? Because the electric car is expensive. We all take electric cars compared with those 200.03 million cars, you can not do, the cost of photovoltaic cells more than 20,000. So Musk let Tesla direct lock sports car class market, this is his first innovation. Second, he put the internet's sense of participation Ah, Word-of-mouth marketing Ah, this whole set up. He makes you think you have a Tesla is fashion, cool. And Tesla is also booking on the internet, online direct, queuing, to remove all intermediate channels, do not rely on advertising, relying on the first user after the good experience of Word-of-mouth marketing, anyway, his target customer relative circle relatively concentrated, this kind of scientific and technological feelings have tried enthusiasm of the upstart are always in their own circle of exchange. A person buys Tesla, this will become a circle of fashion topic; When a lot of people buy Tesla, this is the standard configuration in the circle. So in that circle, there are only two kinds of cars left: One is Tesla, the other is the other. When the seed core user circle is popularized, it can generate new radiation potential energy, and affect and attract more users. Some people accuse Tesla, think it is not enough to pull wind, or that it uses the battery technology is a large thousands of 18650 batteries in parallel, not advanced, does not represent the advanced direction of technology and so on. Well, the Tesla may not be as good as Ferrari, and it has a big gap with Ferrari and Porsche. His industrial modelling may not be the coolest., however, his full intelligent control, feel, user experience, every detail, is good. As a sports car, his main parameters are very high, speed up quickly. Tesla used battery material technology is not so "dream advanced", but a huge amount of battery-series power management technology you have to admit that it is indeed a great ability. The real key is that the user is not directly aware of precisely not the technology, but the specific driving and intelligent network experience. Elon Musk through smarter market positioning let Tesla in the car market, and then through the full Internet intelligent experience, let Tesla users feel Tesla unique connotation. Tesla Automotive Intelligent Systems, with strong software systems and Internet services. Elon Musk may not be able to design a classic sedan model like Henrik Fisker, but he can help an enterprise develop with excellent product thinking and marketing and management experience. Tesla's success relies on accurate positioning, advanced product thinking, and the ability of super systems engineering that is robust, reliable and economically achievable with cutting-edge sophisticated technology. The broad vision of aerospace technology, IT, the Internet, new energy and automobiles has given him a powerful integration capability to turn technology into reality. In fact, he is also software hardware plus the Internet, ironman three. Compared with Elon Musk, we all seem to be able to do other things, but he does not think anyone else can. So, Elon Musk has become a new generation of Silicon Valley superstar.