Broken Kode

Another upstart entered the Electric Vehicle market, Detroit Electric. Damon Lavrinc over on Wired implied that Detroit Electric was copying Tesla’s ideas and more importantly their business model. I don’t believe these are valid points however which can be explained by way of a third electric vehicle manufacturer, Fisker.

Fisker has been in the news recently. Their lead designer (and ex-CEO) Henrik Fisker was forced to resign from the company, on the 13th of March. They also recently lost their last white hope for survival by way of Chinese investors. And the troubles continue for Fisker as it effectively implodes in on itself. How is Fisker’s story connected to Tesla’s? In more ways than you would originally guess. Tesla own their plant and technology - Fisker never did.

The idea that Detroit Electric are ‘stealing’ Tesla’s business model can only really extend to the fact that they both started their life based on the Lotus Elise platform (not exactly a Tesla innovation). However, most importantly Detroit Electric is moving down the Fisker route, of outsourcing much of the required technology and production.

The coming year will see both companies diverge even more, as Tesla tries to move into the SUV market (with the Model X), while DE is moving towards smaller sedans and even a potential hatchback (based on early comments from their CEO, Albert Lam). The main question that will play out over the next few years is to see whether the outsourcing model will succeed, where it has failed in the past - or is Tesla’s model of owning the production and technology the economically sustainable solution in this nascent industry?

These last couple of weeks I’ve refrained from posting some of the longer form articles on the site as I’ve been diving deeper and deeper into the world of the Tesla and Electric Vehicles. I shouldn’t be surprised, but even though the industry is nascent, it has already amassed an incredible amount of history in a very short period.

I’ve dived in, but the more I read, the more information I need to uncover. My main intention with this site is to produce something that you want to come to every day and that hopefully you will enjoy reading, to find out more about this industry that is on the cusp of becoming mature.

However in order to achieve that goal, I need to make sure that I do my research first and that I’ve understood the players and their companies, their histories and their motivations.

Others out there obviously understand this industry better than I do, my aim is to become one of them. In my drafts there is a post where I get it completely wrong. I never published that article, because it felt a little early for me to be able to make these predictions about what a company I had been following for a few months would do - it was the correct thing to do. Clearly I needed to prepare better which is what I intend to do.