There’s an old adage about “the steady march of progress.” The truth, in fact, is that when it comes to technology and innovation, game-changing, massive leaps in progress are highly sporadic. Years or even decades can go by with just small, incremental gains before one key discovery or innovation comes along and unleashes a short, blinding torrent of progress. In the fields of medicine, the advent of technologies like antibiotics or genetic sequencing resulted in order of magnitude increases in knowledge and treatments, over very short periods of time. In the automotive world, it was 100 years ago that Henry Ford introduced the “modern” assembly line to automobile production, resulting in a groundswell shift in the importance and availability of the car to every human on the planet. In the ensuing 100 years, there have been many, many innovations in the automotive world, but none that so fundamentally changed the future arc of the automobile, in the same way. However, we might be on the verge of another such paradigm shift.
While cars have steadily evolved over the past 100 years, when you really boil it down, they are still fundamentally the same—four wheels support a compartment propelled by an internal combustion gas engine. Of course, today’s S-Class Mercedes-Benz is a technological marvel when compared to Benz’s turn of the century, single-cylinder-powered trike, but considering the strides made in other fields over the same time period, it is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Even the way we build and sell cars has been relatively unchanged for the past 50 years or more. Cars are built on an assembly line, and then only sold through an antiquated system of middlemen who cling to highly variable pricing structures, not unlike buying satchels of dates in a Bedouin bazaar. Then along came Tesla.
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