Tesla gave us tech on wheels, so how come it forgot to include the service centres?

theguardian.com:

The first thing one learns when purchasing a Tesla, as this columnist did in December 2020, is that the neighbours immediately begin to hold one personally responsible for Elon Musk. The co-founder and now Supreme Leader of the company is, one finds, widely regarded by non-techies as a fruitcake with a bad Twitter habit, so it follows that anyone who buys one of his cars must be a devotee of the world’s richest nutter and therefore not properly earthed.

Interestingly, there was a time, not so very long ago, 2005 to be precise, that this view of Musk was held by sensible German men in suits, who laughed at the idea of this jerk building automobiles. Didn’t he know that making cars is hard and that BMW, Mercedes, Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, Toyota and the rest had spent the best part of a century figuring out how to do it profitably at scale? Sure, he might be able to produce expensive toys for Silicon Valley types – but real cars?

The industry’s derisive scepticism reminds me of 2007, when Apple launched the iPhone. This was at a time when Nokia and Blackberry ruled the world and the mobile marketplace was deemed “mature”. Yet here was this Steve Jobs in his black turtleneck – a guy with no experience of the mobile industry – touting a phone with no keypad and a battery that users couldn’t replace.

Well, we know how that story played out. Nokia and co failed to notice that what Jobs had created was a powerful networked computer that fitted in your hand – and could do phone calls too. In the end, that phone upended – and transformed – a “mature” industry.

The interesting thing is that, with Tesla, history seems to have repeated itself. The company built nearly a million cars last year and sold every one. There seems to