Our View: Dreaming of fancy new cars and good jobs
To our great-grandparents, Henry Ford was an industrial genius. He created the assembly line, made cars commonplace and is credited with rearranging the landscape of the American dream.
Baby boomers had Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Dave Packard, who ushered us into a vast and complicated digital world. The millennial generation has heroes, too. One of them is Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk.
Musk took 180,000 orders on a concept last week. He believes he can make an all-electric car – the Tesla Model 3 – that will go 215 miles on a single charge, get from 0 to 60 in under 6 seconds, recharge in minutes, and will include an autopilot option that allows us to leave the driving to Mr. Musk when we don’t want to.
No wonder people were lining up to put down $1,000 on a car they won’t see until sometime in “late 2017.”
Musk raised $180 million on a $35,000 car that doesn’t yet exist. Who needs venture capitalists when you have adventurous drivers?
We agree with the millennials (and others) who don’t consider this much of a risk.
Musk, after all, was one of the people who dreamed up eBay. When eBay was sold, he used his $1.5 billion as seed money for his car company. Then his space exploration company. Then his battery company. Musk has dozens of ideas. He wants to create solar-charged battery pods capable of powering entire households, allowing all of us to disconnect from the grid.
In 2013, Yahoo Finance listed “Three reasons Elon Musk will change the world” and barely mentioned rockets or batteries or cars. Instead, it raved over his reimagined supply chains, his backing by big-money equity funds and his contempt for competitors.
But if Musk is going to change the world, we want him start nearby. We’re talking about smart, dedicated people looking for work in our Valley.
If Musk is going to be able to deliver 200,000 reasonably priced rechargeable wondercars by Christmas 2017, he’s going to need more production capacity and more workers.
Musk is making his first two Tesla models in the factory he acquired in 2010 – the former New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. plant in Fremont. It’s huge, with 16 million square feet under the roof on a 370-acre campus. That ought to be plenty big enough for turning out 200,000 new Model 3s every year.
It’s no longer uncommon to see a Tesla in this region. In fact, a Bee staffer was passed by two – one black, one red – on the way to work Monday morning. A decade ago, before Musk started dreaming up his cars, no one would have thought it possible a new car company could ever take hold in North America, much less one county over.
The world needs dreamers as much as it needs doers. When they’re both rolled into one, we get something more – we get modern industrial heroes. And we get things like cool cars, good jobs and bigger dreams. In our Valley, our biggest dreams are good jobs.
This story was originally published April 4, 2016 at 5:32 PM with the headline "Our View: Dreaming of fancy new cars and good jobs."