#carbon-palooza

[tomorrowusa]

Trump solicited about $1 billion from Big Oil at a fundraising conclave at Mar-a-Lago in return for future favorable treatment — if their filthy lucre helps him return to the Oval Office.

We lost four years fighting climate change during the previous Trump administration. A second term would do the planet grievous harm.

It's necessary to alert everybody concerned about the future of Earth of the danger of a second Trump presidency.

A new Washington Post report that Trump made explicit policy promises to a roomful of Big Oil executives—while urging them to raise $1 billion for his campaign—is a powerful story in part because it wrecks what’s left of that mystique. In case you didn’t already know this, it shows yet again that if Trump has employed that aforementioned knowledge of elite corruption and self-dealing to any ends in his public career, it’s chiefly to benefit himself. That counter narrative is a story that Democrats have a big opportunity to tell—if they seize on this news effectively. How might they do that? For starters, the revelations seem to cry out for more scrutiny from Congress. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who has been presiding over hearings into the oil industry as chair of the Budget Committee, says it’s “highly likely” that the committee will examine the new revelations. [ ... ]

As the Post reports, an oil company executive at the gathering, held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last month, complained about environmental regulations under the Biden administration. Then this happened: Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation. Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people. Obviously industries have long donated to politicians in both parties in hopes of governance that takes their interests into account, and they explicitly lobby for this as well. But in this case, Trump may have made detailed, concrete promises while simultaneously soliciting a precise amount in campaign contributions.

Just a mention that Tumblr formatting won't permit indentations inside indentations. As a substitute, I used red to depict double indentation.

Anyway...

For instance, the Post reports, Trump vowed to scrap Biden’s ban on permits for new liquefied natural gas exports “on the first day.” He also promised to overturn new tailpipe emission limits designed to encourage the transition to electric vehicles, and he dangled more leases for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, “a priority that several of the executives raised.” “The phrase that instantly came to mind as I was reading the story was ‘quid pro quo,’” Whitehouse told me. He also pointed to a new Politico report that oil industry officials are drawing up executive orders for Trump to sign as president. “Put those things together and it starts to look mighty damn corrupt,” Whitehouse said.

Trump may just be a pile of orange flab with a porcine mouth and bad hair, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't be taken seriously. Among many other bad things, Trump is a figurehead for Big Oil. Oil companies are already busy composing executive orders for Trump to sign.

If elected, Trump would throw into reverse our transition to a decarbonized future, one that’s creating untold numbers of manufacturing jobs—including in the very places that Trump has attacked Democratic elites for supposedly abandoning—all in exchange for mega-checks from chortling fat cats right out of the most garish of Gilded Age cartoons. For good measure, some of that loot could help Trump secure elite impunity for his own corruption and alleged crimes. We can’t say we weren’t warned. Trump has told us all this himself.

Progressives toying with third party temptations need to be set right: The only way to defeat Donald Trump is to vote for Joe Biden.

There will NEVER be a President RFK Jr., a President Jill Stein, or a President Cornel West. Such vanity candidates are usually little more than eccentric freaks. The last time a non-Democrat or non-Republican was elected president was 1848. But with American democracy and the future of the planet at stake, self-indulgence at the ballot box this year could lead directly to dystopia.

[petnews2day]

How to Minimize Your Pet's Carbon Paw Print

New Post has been published on https://petnews2day.com/small-pets/how-to-minimize-your-pets-carbon-paw-print/

How to Minimize Your Pet's Carbon Paw Print

Our pets help connect us to nature. By sharing our lives with these once-wild creatures, we get more in tune with the natural world. The social and emotional sustenance we get from them makes us better Earth citizens.

But we’ve entered a new era: Let’s call it the “calculating Sparky’s CO2 emissions” phase. According to one researcher, just feeding the cats and dogs of North America emits up to 64 million tons of greenhouse gases a year. Factor in all the indirect emissions—transportation to and from the vet, the plastic-palooza that is a big-box pet store, plus all that poop—and things start to look ruff.

Happily, though, the same principles that help you live more sustainably also apply to Fluffy and Fido. What’s good for the environment is also good for your pet—no compromises on tasty treats necessary.

Getting a Pet

First off, adopt; don’t shop. Millions of animals are available from shelters and rescue operations, which—unlike breeders—spay and neuter their wards, reducing overpopulation. You don’t need to limit yourself to a dog or a cat. Some shelters house herbivores like rabbits, rodents, goats, and reptiles (did you know some are vegan?) that would love to move in with you.

Feeding Your New Best Friend

The bulk of pets’ carbon paw print stems from their diet. If Americans’ 163 million dogs and cats started their own country, Fluffistan would rank fifth in global meat consumption. As more people consider their pets members of the family, the pampering and sustenance industries are responding with premium products, which is both good and bad. On the one hand, your local pet store probably carries food made with organic, sustainably farmed, perhaps even plant-based ingredients. On the other hand, people’s decision to spring for “human-grade” pet food is a morally questionable choice in a country where more than 10 percent of the population is food insecure.

The truth is, pets aren’t picky. They’re fine with “snout to tail” consumption. Seek out Green Petfood, Royal Canin, and other food brands that incorporate rendered animal byproducts. Try treats from Chippin, made from delicious, low-impact crickets. Ask your local pet store about brands that participate in recycling programs, such as Tetra Pak.

Home-Cooked Meals FTW

The internet abounds with recipes for sustainable pet food, but talk to your vet first about your pet’s specific nutritional needs. Veterinary scientist Jordan Schaul recommends prioritizing meats with the lowest carbon footprint, like chicken. You’ll want to mix up equal parts of unseasoned protein (try sourcing from local farmers or butchers who have unpopular cuts and offal), raw veggies, and root veggies like sweet potato and pumpkin. Save money on treats by freezing bits of bulk peanut butter or dehydrating food scraps like sweet potato peels. No matter the grub, don’t overfeed your pets.

Plant-Based Pooches?

Cats are obligate carnivores that require sulfur-rich amino acids like taurine at levels typically available only in meat-based diets. But contrary to their “carnivorous wolf descendant” reputation, most dogs are good candidates for flexitarianism, if not veganism.

Caroline Buck, cofounder of Petaluma (which makes pet food formulated with protein from peanut butter, chickpeas, and peas), explains that in evolving as scavengers alongside humans, dogs grew accustomed to handling starches and glucose and “long ago became omnivores.” If your dog has a meat-heavy diet, you’ll want to gradually adjust its micro­biome to a plant-based one.

Fun and Games

A zero- or low-waste lifestyle for your pet is more doable than you think. Look for toys made from upcycled materials, like denim or rope, and consumable chew toys. Invest in durable leashes, harnesses, and collars (check out brands like Wanderruff, which makes them out of recycled consumer plastic), and tell your local pet store how much you prefer plastic-free goods. As with human wares, supporting local companies saves emissions, and DIY is always the most climate-friendly option. Remember, pets aren’t fussy, so get creative with leftover rope, cloth, and cardboard. Schaul says that your feline doesn’t need a fancy cat condo—”your bookshelf is just as stimulating”—and your dog doesn’t need to travel great distances to Insta-worthy dog beaches and trails. As long as dogs are getting out regularly and enjoying olfactory stimulation, nearby fields and parks make for epic outings. Do wildlife and plant ecosystems a favor by keeping dogs on leash in all but designated off-leash areas. And if your cat enjoys the great outdoors, consider a “catio,” which keeps your puss from wreaking havoc on birds and small mammals and potentially passing on deadly pathogens via its feces.

Beautifying Your Pet

Check for shampoos and other grooming products that are free from unnecessary chemicals, artificial dyes and fragrances, parabens, sulfates, and mineral oils. DIY salves or options from Green Groom and Buddy Wash are better for both planet and pet.

When Nature Calls

All that food has to end up somewhere. America’s pets produce over 5 million tons of feces a year—more than that of 90 million Americans. When cleaning your yard, scoop the poop into trash bags you’re already using. Better yet, consider flushing your dog’s waste down the toilet (but never your cat’s—toxoplasma, a parasite found in cat feces, can infect marine life). You can also compost dog waste: Schaul says that you’ll need a mix of nitrogen-rich materials like food waste and grass cuttings, and carbon-rich materials like sawdust or leaves. For cats, avoid kitty litter containing bentonite clay, which comes from strip mines, and look into biodegradable options like Yesterday’s News by Purina and Cedarific by Nepco. If you must use puppy pee pads, get machine-washable ones.

Saying Goodbye

We all hate to think about our pet dying, but a little advance planning can soften the heavy eco-punch of pet interment. Look into biodegradable caskets and urns (Passages International makes them from willow, mulberry bark, and recycled cardboard). Cremation is generally safer and more sustainable than burial. Backyard burial is illegal in some states and can pose dangers to animals that may scavenge your pet’s body—diseases and lingering euthanasia drugs can be passed on this way. Honor your departed pet’s legacy by donating used toys, bowls, and bedding to your local shelter (but first check to make sure it accepts them).

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 quarterly edition with the headline “How to Minimize Your Pet’s Carbon Paw Print.“

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[onthegoinmco]

DISCLOSURE: I was invited by Walt Disney World to experience a Flurry of Fun at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, but all opinions are my own.

There is a festive holiday spirit in the air at Disney’s Hollywood Studios as a Flurry of Fun has been added this holiday season that includes new decorations, shows, treats, and more that can be experienced every day from now until December 31st!

The fun goes from day to night, so let’s take a look some of the highlights of holiday fun at Disney’s Hollywood Studios!

Nine Ways To Have A Flurry Of Fun At Disney’s Hollywood Studios

1. Take a stroll around Echo Lake

Echo Lake, just off of Hollywood Boulevard, has received a retro and merry makeover that includes extra-large ornaments on the water, colorful garlands and medallions on every light pole, a few woodland friends, decorated umbrellas, and the centerpiece of the decorations is a giant Christmas tree centered on the water that is a perfect backdrop for photos. Dinosaur Gertie is also excited for the fun, and is festively dressed for the holidays.

Don’t forget to visit Echo Lake at night, as the area comes alive with lights. A stroll around Echo Lake is a great way to end your day in the park.

2. See a new holiday tag For the First Time in Forever

Disney

The ever popular For the First Time in Forever: A Frozen Sing-Along Celebration fills the Hyperion Theater with holiday fun and songs as the royal historians, Anna, Elsa, and Kristoff welcome Olaf to the show for the holiday season to share all-new songs from Disney’s new animated short “Olaf’s Frozen Adventure”.

The holiday addition fits seamlessly into the existing show, and having Olaf in the show is a holiday present for the audience.

3. Make sure you are on the right list with Santa

You can’t celebrate the holidays without a visit to see Santa, but during the Flurry of Fun at Disney’s Hollywood Studios there are TWO ways to meet the big guy!

The Once Upon a Time store, located among the star-studded stores all along Sunset Boulevard, you can get in those holiday requests and photos in person with Kris Kringle from November 9 to December 24, 2017.

Jolly Old Saint Nick will be greeting good girls and good boys in an area decorated just for the occasion with Christmas trees, ornate garlands, and even a lovely red and gold rug.

But remember! Santa will only be available to meet until Christmas Eve. Be sure to visit him during his limited appearance dates, taking place from November 9 to December 24, 2017!

After Christmas, “Yule” laugh your way right into the New Year when Goofy takes over for the big guy from December 25 to 31, 2017.

Once Christmas morning arrives, Santa Claus will be well on his way back to the North Pole… but don’t you worry it’s Santa Goofy to the rescue! Don’t miss your chance to ring in 2018 with a hearty laugh and even a picture too as you spend time with the goofiest holiday Character in history.

Please keep in mind that all entertainment and appearances are subject to change without notice, and if you are looking for information on meeting Santa or Santa Goofy check with a Cast Member when you arrive at the park, Guest Relations is located to the far left of the entrance as you are facing the park.

4. Grab a sweet treat

Disney

The holidays aren’t the holidays without sweet treats, and The Disney Parks Blog shared a look at the fun for foodies!

My favorite treat was the over-the-top red velvet whoopie pies that are piled hight with icing garland, ornament pearls, and holiday sprinkles that are tree-shaped and available at Sweet Spells and Fairfax Fare.

Fans of Olaf will be overjoyed, because he stars on several desserts around the park! Olaf can be found dancing on cupcakes at ABC Commissary, Rosie’s All-American Café, Catalina Eddie’s, Fairfax Fare and Sweet Spells. There’s an Olaf Pop at Gertie’s Ice Cream of Extinction along Echo Lake, an Olaf Sundae at Hollywood Scoops on Sunset Boulevard, and Sugar Frosted Fruit Bites at Pretzel Palooza on Sunset Boulevard. For even more fun, there is even an Olaf-themed sipper that comes filled with a fun “Frozen” beverage that can be found in several locations around the park.

5. Festive beverages for adults

Disney

For the holiday season, guests over the age of 21 can look forward to a selection of specialty beverages themed to the celebrations.

It isn’t always hot in Florida, and you may find that you want to warm up with a spiked hot chocolate that can be found at both Min and Bill’s Dockside Diner along Echo Lake and Fairfax Fare on Sunset Boulevard. The selection of hot chocolates includes a hot chocolate martini, Bailey’s Salted Caramel hot chocolate, black cherry bourbon hot chocolate, and there is even a hot chocolate flight where you can sample all three if you can’t choose just one to try.

Other adult beverages available this year include a Peppermint White Russian, a Winterberry Cooler and a Let It Glow drink consisting of vodka and blue-raspberry frozen carbonated beverage with your very own glow cube at various locations around Echo Lake and Sunset Boulevard.

6. Watch as the streets of Hollywood come alive during Sunset Seasons Greetings

On Sunset Boulevard, just off of the main entrance’s Hollywood Boulevard, as night falls a ‘snowy’ holiday celebration takes place as billboards above the street move into motion with appearances from some beloved characters who are sharing their love of the holidays.

The billboards above direct you to look at the iconic Hollywood Tower Hotel, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, as it is magically transformed, courtesy of some cutting edge projections, bringing to characters’ stories to life and into motion.

The Disney character moments during Sunset Seasons include:

Mickey and Minnie reminiscing about a hometown Christmas as the scene shifts into a romanticized, Norman Rockwell-inspired town—starting in black and white before slowly changing into color.

The Toy Story characters guessing which new toys are coming this Christmas as the scene becomes covered in holiday wrapping paper.

The Swedish Chef from The Muppets babbling as only he can while the scene turns into giant gingerbread houses.

And finally, Olaf pining over his holiday wish as iconic music plays and the scene freezes over into a Frozen winter wonderland—complete with dancing Aurora Borealis lights and projected falling snow.

Each of these scenes lasts for almost 3 minutes, and play on a loop. So you are invited to slow down your pace and enjoy the show as you make your way to the attractions and restaurants or grab a spot to watch them all. If you do decide to grab a spot for a bit, please make sure you are considerate to other guests who might be making their way down the Boulevard.

7. Jingle Bell, Jingle BAM!

Disney

Jingle Bell, Jingle BAM! is back this year with even more BAM!

Jingle Bell, Jingle BAM! is a nighttime spectacular full of fun and hijinks that features traditional holiday tunes, state-of-the-art projections from Disney Animation classics, special effects, fireworks, a little snow, and unexpected surprises.

It’s “Kringle Level 9” for the stars of ABC’s Prep & Landing Wayne and Lanny as they search for Santa who has gone missing. You will get caught up in the adventure as the Chinese Theater, as well as the surrounding buildings and rooftops, come alive to immerse you into scenes from Mickey’s Christmas Carol, Beauty and the Beast, Pluto’s Christmas Tree, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, and more. The festive finale is a snowy, visual wonderland that is a must-see for the holiday season.

For the best viewing spot, make sure you arrive early and have a sight line that includes as much of the Chinese Theater and surrounding buildings as you can. Most of the firework bursts happen on the right side of the Theater, but even more effects and fireworks are launched from the surrounding areas.

8. Jingle Bell, Jingle BAM! Dessert Party

Disney

If you want to really amp up your Flurry of Fun, I suggest booking the Jingle Bell, Jingle BAM! Dessert Party.

During the party you can enjoy specialty sweets and sips from around the park before you move to a special reserved viewing area to enjoy Jingle Bell, Jingle BAM! The viewing area, weather and condition permitting, is located in the Chinese Theater courtyard.

Among the desserts offered are candy cane brownies, holiday Mickey and Minnie sugar cookies, warm pumpkin pie spiced bread pudding, and sweet Yule Log.

And at the end of the party you get to take home a special ornament as a gift to remember your evening at Disney’s Hollywood Studios!

The Jingle Bell, Jingle BAM! Dessert Party is a premium event that is not included with admission that takes place nightly through December 31. Pricing does change based on date, and from now to December 15, pricing is $79 for adults and $45 for children ages 3-9; and December 17-31, adults are $89 and children are $49 (gratuity and tax included).

Reservations must be made in advance either online or by calling 407-WDW-DINE (407-939-3463).

9. Minnie’s Holiday Dine-In

Disney

You can deck the halls at a dazzling dinner party filled with holiday cheer and amazing food at Disney’s Hollywood Studios at Minnie’s Holiday Dine-In.

Minnie Mouse is the hostess-with-the-mostest, and she is throwing a fantastic feast that features a mix of fun music and décor with a seasonal menu that is full of the joy of the season.

Minnie greets you at the door for a special photo opportunity, and while you are dining you can meet Mickey Mouse, Daisy Duck, Donald Duck, and Goofy as they stop by your table to pose for pictures and holiday hugs.

And before you leave, make sure you pick up your gift from your thoughtful hostess!

Minnie’s Seasonal Dining events cost $50 per adult and $30 per child, plus tax and gratuity. Reservations are required and can be made online or using the My Disney Experience App. Some dining plans accepted, so check before you go.

If you are not planning on attending at Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party, this is a great time to get photos with some of your favorite characters in their holiday finest while enjoying a great meal. I have had the chance to go to several of Minnie’s holiday get togethers, and I look forward to them every time!

And while this is a buffet, don’t feel like you can’t dine here if you have allergies because they go above and beyond accommodating guests with allergies and dietary concerns!

Spending the holidays at Disney’s Hollywood Studios has always been a great way to kick off our holiday celebrations in November, but this year it is even better with all of these new additions! It truly is a Flurry of Fun!

The post Nine Ways To Have A Flurry Of Fun At Disney’s Hollywood Studios appeared first on On the Go in MCO.

[ramialkarmi]

'Do you want to see the car?': The story of the day that Tesla stunned the world (TSLA, F)

In early 2016, Ford was intensely preparing to stage a history-repeating assault on the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France.

With two teams and four new Ford GT race cars competing in both North America and Europe, the goal was to grab a win at the grueling endurance competition and remind the world of Ford's 1-2-3 triumph in 1966 over Ferrari — 50 years before.

But while Ford and Chip Ganassi Racing were battling it out on the track, another challenge was taking shape.

In California, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was preparing to pull the cover off his long-awaited Model 3 mass-market vehicle — a car intended to show the auto industry that Tesla was ready to take its disruption to a whole new level.

In this excerpt from Business Insider Senior Correspondent Matthew DeBord's book "Return to Glory: The Story of Ford's Revival and Victory in the Toughest Race in the World" (Atlantic Monthly Press), we get a front-row seat at the Model 3 reveal, a vehicle that began production this week — and watch as Ford and the rest of the 100-year-old car business try to respond.

And so it begins ...

On a balmy March evening in Los Angeles, just three months before the most advanced Ford race car ever built would take to the Circuit de la Sarthe in France, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk took to a stage at his electric-car start-up’s design center, just a few miles south of Hollywood and the American cinematic dream factory.

Musk was there to pull the cover off a dream that had nothing to do with movie magic. Instead, he sauntered onstage dressed entirely in black and, after some awkward jokes, made a few comments about the impending catastrophe of global warming—one of the multi-billionaire’s overriding personal preoccupations and the reason he bought into Tesla in 2004 after making $180 million when eBay acquired PayPal, the electronic payments service he had cofounded. He then proceeded to preside over the rollout of Tesla’s much-anticipated Model 3, a mass-market electric vehicle that would sell for $35,000 when it hit Tesla’s showrooms in 2017.

Tesla was already selling a pair of game-changing cars: the Model S sedan, which in its most advanced configuration, equipped with the “Ludicrous” acceleration mode, could scorch a zero-to-sixty run in less than three seconds, outrunning supercars from Ferrari and Lamborghini; and the Model X SUV, with its exotic, up-swinging “falcon wing” doors and “bioweapon defense mode” air-filtration system. But these long-range electric vehicles (EVs) sold for $100,000 and up, to a well-heeled elite, including Silicon Valley venture capitalists and titans of finance.

That certainly created useful cash flow for Tesla (if not profits), but it didn’t suit Musk’s grand vision, which was to accelerate humanity’s transition from the era of fossil fuels—an era that had filled the atmosphere with carbon, disrupting weather patterns, and making the planet hotter. In early December 2015, Musk gave a speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, in connection with the United Nations Climate Summit, in which he called governments’ reluctance to tax the generation of atmospheric carbon the “dumbest science experiment in history” and “madness.” He went on to call for a global carbon tax, as he had done several times before.

No chief executive of a traditional automaker would even consider giving a speech like the one Musk delivered, although several have raised the suggestion that car companies—as producers of a technology that alongside burning coal to generate electricity contributes much of the carbon in the atmosphere—should be part of the sweeping solution.

The multi-trillion-dollar global auto industry has found itself smack at the center of what can’t be responsibly characterized anymore as a debate. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the majority of car executives aren’t global-warming deniers, there are more than a billion vehicles on the roads worldwide, and automakers continue to build millions of new cars and trucks every year. If they stop, or attempt to radically convert to manufacturing vast fleets of Tesla-like vehicles, they’ll rapidly go bankrupt.

They are, however, not stupid. Gasoline is simply the most convenient fuel for their products currently. Almost without exception, the world’s car companies are trying to move in a Teslaesque direction, if haltingly and on a rather small scale at the moment.

Elon Musk and his vision of the future

Musk bought into Tesla, eventually displacing cofounder Martin Eberhard in an unpleasant management coup, specifically to attack what he considers to be the biggest problem facing humanity. But he didn’t want to be boring. He reasoned that a sexy, fast electric car—such as the original Roadster Tesla soon produced—would shake EVs free of their “glorified golf cart” stigma and convince both buyers and investors to fund the demise of the internal-combustion engine.

Tesla began selling stock to the public in 2010, at seventeen dollars per share. A few years later, the Model S was launched; Motor Trend would name it Car of the Year in 2013. Tesla had endured numerous near-death experiences prior to the IPO, including an episode in 2008 that brought the company just weeks from bankruptcy. But once the Model S started selling, the accolades began rolling in—the luxurious EV, with its brisk acceleration, sharply minimalist looks, and huge central dashboard touchscreen, was a hit with the automotive media. The stock went, as they say on Wall Street, parabolic; in 2014, it would flirt with $300 per share, ensuring early investors a return of around 1,200 percent.

The financials would pitch and yaw wildly over the next two years, as investors tried to figure out when, if ever, the carmaker would make money and whether its innovations, including an astonishing self-driving autopilot feature, would completely disrupt an auto industry that had been selling largely gas-burning cars, and lots of them, for over a century.

But on that early evening in March, Musk was a conquering hero, a South Africa–born heir apparent to Henry Ford and the late Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs. Musk’s other company, SpaceX, was taking care of another scope of his vision, the effort to make humans a “multi-planetary” species with a colony on Mars, the planet to which Musk said he would retire.

It is easy to understand why Musk, then forty-four, was a model for Robert Downey Jr.’s character Tony Stark in the "Iron Man" movies. He did cars. He did rockets. He even did solar energy in his role as the chairman of SolarCity, a company started by his cousins. (And acquired by Tesla in 2016 for $2.1 billion.) He was the superstar entrepreneur of Silicon Valley. Musk attacked huge problems head-on, like a technologist of old. And he was aware of just how quixotic his ambitions were. Starting a car company, he would say, is idiotic, and an electric-car company is idiocy squared.

An unprecedented number of preorders for the Model 3

What got Detroit’s attention that night wasn’t the Model 3 itself; the car had been much discussed for several years, and everyone knew what to expect in a smaller, less expensive Tesla. Rather, the star of the show was the preorder counter, displayed behind a bright red Model 3 on a huge screen on the stage.

Analysts had expected something like 150,000 Model 3s to be reserved, each with a $1,000 refundable deposit. By the time I took a photo of the counter at the event, it had crossed 174,000. In a month, 373,000 reservations would be logged, creating the potential for $13 billion to flow into Tesla’s needy coffers, assuming a relatively conservative average price of $35,000 for each sale. Who knows how many of those reservations will ultimately turn into sales? Even if only a quarter or a half of them do, it is still an impressive number and a testament to the potential demand.

"So, do you want to see the car?" Musk winkingly asked, before giving three preproduction versions of the car the stage.

A better question—and one that he would ask as the preorders surged—was, "How many of these cars can we actually build?"

The traditional auto industry is secretly obsessed with Tesla (and not-so-secretly obsessed in the first six months of 2017, when Tesla's market capitalization surged past $50 billion, topping Ford, GM, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles — the Big Three had become the Big Four). Not since Preston Tucker, an innovator of the 1950s whose own quixotic life was chronicled in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1988 film "Tucker: The Man and His Dream," had anyone so thoroughly captivated the iconic world of the American automobile.

The CEOs of major auto companies tend to be either hard-charging, sharp-elbowed "car guys" or technocratic bean counters. Occasionally a major change agent such as Alan Mulally will come along, but many chief executives got to the big chair after decades of loyal service.

After Mark Fields got the CEO job at Ford in 2014, he freely admitted that the company had bought a Tesla Model S, taken it apart, and put it back together again. He later said the company would do likewise with the Model X SUV.

But even by the secretive standards of Tesla fascination, the Model 3 preorder palooza was earth-shattering. From Dearborn to Toyota City, the automakers just couldn’t believe it. The astounding number of deposits showed the intense desire to join the club that the brand represented. The only meaningful comparison to draw was with Apple. In the auto industry, you could say that Ferrari held a similar mystique, but Ferrari didn’t have the ambition to dethrone the gas-burning engine or sell half a million cars a year. Tesla did, and it was sort of appalling to mainstream auto executives.

Traditional automakers work desperately hard to capture and retain customers, spending billions to convince them to stick with certain brands and to advance through vehicle hierarchies, from inexpensive mass-market cars to pricey luxury rides. What was astonishing about Tesla’s Model 3 launch was that hundreds of thousands of buyers were happy to give Tesla an open-ended, no-interest cash loan, with no meaningful guarantee beyond Musk’s word that the cars would arrive on time.

Musk’s promises had a poor track record. Both the Model S and the Model X had suffered from production delays and early quality-control problems. In fact, Musk admitted that Tesla had been guilty of "hubris" in designing and engineering the Model X, which had many complicated features that slowed the assembly line. The doors had to be completely redesigned at the eleventh hour. The second-row seats turned out to be so complicated that Tesla would eventually take the supplier off the job and engineer this component itself.

Later, quality-control glitches would appear. The entire Model S fleet was voluntarily recalled in December 2015 because a seat-belt assembly could fail. The initial production run of the Model X, several thousand vehicles, would also be recalled because the third-row seats could pitch forward in a crash.

Much earlier, there had been battery fires with the Model S, and Tesla had been compelled to design a shielding system for the bottom of the car to prevent punctures of the battery pack. Tesla’s advanced electronics and software, while game changing in many respects, were buggy in the way that Silicon Valley code typically is (the ritual is to release the software and fix it later). In an annual dependability survey by J. D. Power and Associates conducted in 2016, Tesla owners reported so many problems that Tesla finished in the bottom five, undercutting the narrative that its vehicles were redefining the ownership experience with rapid software updates.

Even though Musk admitted that the Model X SUV was so advanced that Tesla “probably shouldn’t have built it,” his boundless gumption still captivated the industry.

Musk calls his own shots

In the traditional auto industry, Musk had only one prominent naysayer, former GM product guru Bob Lutz, who had worked for BMW and for Chrysler under Lee Iacocca before coming to GM and straddling the pre- and post-bankruptcy companies. I talked to Lutz about Tesla on several occasions between 2014 and 2016—once at the Detroit auto show in January 2016, when he was preparing to reveal a new American-made supercar venture with onetime Tesla competitor Henrik Fisker—and he was always unflinchingly equal in his praise for Tesla’s cars and his disdain for Musk’s management of the company.

Lutz’s attitudes toward global warming were controversial. While not exactly a climate-science denier, he was skeptical that taking internal-combustion engines off the road and replacing them with more expensive and less versatile electric cars was a solution. But that wasn’t what shaped his negative views of Tesla— he actually didn’t think that Tesla was doing a very good job of running its business. In a sense, he and Musk were on the same page: the cars were simply too difficult to build.

But with Ford’s and GM’s stock prices languishing, even as both carmakers notched steady and impressive profits through 2014 and 2015, executives grumbled about how easy it was for Musk to sell additional Tesla stock, which the carmaker did in both 2015 and 2016, raising almost $2 billion in the process. And even though Detroit had been sweepingly reinvented by the financial crisis, the familiar infighting and territorialism that have always defined the auto industry hadn’t disappeared.

In the 1980s, Detroit had endured the Japanese arrival in force in the U.S. market. The Big Three had been forced to adapt, to become more efficient, and to see their companies as large manufacturing and management teams, “flat structure” organizations, where the lowliest assembly-line worker had the power to stop production if he spotted a problem. Sure, Toyota and Honda continued to be extremely hierarchical, in the Japanese business tradition. But when it came to actually building cars, the “relentless pursuit of perfection,” to borrow a famous tagline from Toyota’s Lexus luxury brand, was a mandate that Detroit had to accept. Unsurprisingly, customers preferred cars that always started, didn’t rust out in a matter of years, and could be passed down from generation to generation, Dad’s Honda Accord becoming Junior’s college car.

Musk was a different animal—a leader who called, seemingly, all his own shots. He was initially ridiculed when he appointed himself as Tesla’s product architect, while at the same time having an experienced designer, Franz von Holzhausen, from Mazda, for the real aesthetic work, and JB Straubel overseeing how the cars were engineered at the nuts-and-bolts level. But then the Model S arrived, and with it dropped jaws and widespread media accolades.

Musk didn’t have to fight through a bureaucracy—he was the bureaucracy, and at Tesla, bureaucracy was the enemy. So if Musk wanted to ignore structure, he just did. He had a hardworking communications team, but if he had something to say, he took to Twitter, often at odd hours and on weekends, sending reporters scrambling. He had hardworking engineers, but if he wanted to make a change to a Tesla vehicle, he made it.

In Tesla’s required financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company never failed to cite the so-called “great man” risk: without Musk, Tesla would be in big trouble. The CEOs of big car companies think they have power, and they do. But Musk had power of a different order, as well as lots of stress.

Ford's fights to keep up

By the time Ford was turning practice laps at Le Mans in early June 2016, Musk was running a company that was a decade old. And he was under as much pressure to innovate as everyone else in the industry. Ironically, Ford was probably better prepared to manage the transformation in mobility that Tesla was helping to usher in.

In the face of a massive disruption to the accepted way of doing business, scale can be an invaluable asset. At base, Musk’s company was all about demonstrating that there was a paying buyership for its type of vehicle, reversing the thinking that had followed the demise of GM’s EV1 project from the 1990s, which had brought the first mass-produced electric car to market, but only in a limited way, via leasing.

When GM decided to conclude the program and crush all the EV1s, save a few historical examples, it was widely assumed that electric cars were once again going to be at best a sideline of the auto industry. (GM’s decision inspired the film "Who Killed the Electric Car?" which alleged that the carmaker had acted more to preserve itself from an electric revolution than to dispense with a money-losing experiment.)

Ford’s angle on transportation in the twenty-first century was the preoccupation of Bill Ford, who, once Alan Mulally took over as CEO, could concentrate on delivering a deeply counterintuitive message: that the company we credit with creating the mass-market automobile wanted to curtail its dependence on four wheels and an engine in the future.

The idea was really quite logical. Ford would become a mobility provider. If you needed to own a car, Ford would build one, and Ford dealers would sell it to you—and Ford would lend you the money to buy it. But if you didn’t want to own a car, Ford would provide you with transportation. And if you wanted any aspect of your mobility experience to be more pleasant or efficient, Ford would create—or partner with other companies to create—the information corridors to make that happen.

Ford began to tackle this process in earnest around 2010, and Fields made it a prominent part of his leadership pitch once he became CEO. It was a good fit. Fields had always been a forward-looking leader. (But not forward-looking enough; he would be ousted by Ford's board of directors in May of 2017, as the carmaker's stock price lagged. His replacement, former Steelcase CEO Jim Hackett, was a close confidant of Bill Ford and would undertake the major change in Ford's story.)

Scale can be a strength when a company is being actively disrupted, but the classic theory on the subject—articulated by Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen in his seminal book "The Innovator’s Dilemma"—says that size can protect for only so long. And that’s because new entrants can innovate much more rapidly than incumbents, even if the established business is itself actively trying to innovate.

The core problem—an advantage, actually, for smaller, newer companies—is that the very things that insulate the established player prevent it from moving fast enough. The critical sticking point is failure. Big companies can afford to fail, but they can’t undertake the failure process rapidly enough. And unless their businesses don’t require much cash for research and development, as is the case with software-driven internet firms, they can’t afford to invest in hundreds of over-the-horizon efforts.

For one thing, there’s a disincentive for companies that already have scale to do small stuff; it’s more cost-effective for them to simply buy up smaller companies. And for another, they can be undermined by competitive threats that are enabled by the newest technologies.

Silicon Valley wants to eat Detroit's lunch

It’s this second threat that was generating the biggest risks for Ford and its rivals in 2016.

The ride-sharing service Uber, founded in 2009, came on the scene with a brash, sharp-elbowed CEO named Travis Kalanick aiming to eliminate the taxi business in big cities.

By the time the Ford GT race cars were getting their first taste of the Circuit de la Sarthe, Uber was valued at a staggering $65 billion and had just taken a $3.5 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, as the oil-rich nation sought to diversify beyond the natural resource that had transformed it into one of the world’s most influential and richest countries. (Tesla staged an impressive debit of self-driving technology in Pittsburgh in 2016, but in 2017, the company slid into crisis as workplace-culture issues dogged the startup and Kalanick was caught on video arguing with an Uber driver; the CEO later apologized, admitting that he need help overcoming the drawbacks his harsh style.)

Tesla shook up the traditional carmakers. But they could still figure out what Tesla was: an automaker with some high-tech credibility and electric motors, plus a charismatic leader. Uber was much harder to figure out. Pundits began to argue that with Uber, nobody—except for Uber drivers—would ever need to own a car again. And as self-driving cars accelerated their development, the drivers started to drop out of the picture. The future would consist of autonomous vehicles, owned as large fleets, appearing and disappearing as needed, dispatched by software.

Design, horsepower, speed, the automobile as an icon of freedom— that would all be relegated to the misty past, like stagecoaches and Conestoga wagons. All that would matter is that your pod-mobile appeared when summoned and that it moved you from point A to point B.

Automakers were far from sure that this—for them—dystopian future would come to pass, but they were determined to avoid a slide into irrelevance. GM began to move very aggressively in 2015 and 2016, investing $500 million in Uber’s competitor Lyft, buying up the assets of a mobility start-up called Sidecar, which had gone bankrupt, and most dramatically, buying an obscure self-driving outfit, Cruise Automation, for nearly $1 billion. By the end of 2016, Cruise’s self-driving technology would come to market under the GM banner, as the automaker began selling its Bolt EV, beating Tesla’s Model 3 by at least a year.

But Ford wasn’t hanging back. It created a small fleet of self-driving cars to perfect the technology, which by 2016 was mainly capable of letting drivers take their hands off the steering wheel for freeway driving, as long as they continued to monitor their vehicles. It was widely expected, however, that over the next decade, higher levels of autonomy would be rolled out, leading ultimately to the end of drivers behind the wheel.

The traditional auto industry is, in fact, pretty good at assessing risks. And the broadly held notion that it just wants to stick to the same old, same old, year after year, is simply false. The industry is far too competitive for anyone to avoid innovation; the carmakers that struggle to sell cars are the ones that are forced to starve their research-and-development budgets for too long.

The internal-combustion engine, introduced in the nineteenth century, had been perfected by the early twenty-first, through a process of continuous innovation undertaken by the global auto industry (the gazillion patents related to the internal-combustion engine were one of the reasons that critics often accused the industry of stalling on change).

In fact, a few start-ups in the early 2000s and 2010s were even trying to push the internal-combustion engine to breakthrough levels. A company called Transonic Combustion, which failed because it couldn’t make its technology adequately reliable, developed a fuel-injection system that upgraded gas-burning efficiency to unheard-of levels, with engines delivering 100 miles per gallon.

By early 2016, Ford felt awfully good about where it stood, in terms of preserving itself and embracing the future. The company even had an in-house futurist on staff, and had since before the financial crisis, to spot important trends before they became existential threats—or massive missed opportunities.

But as someone who had covered the company for a decade, and who had a front-row seat for everything happening in Silicon Valley thanks to my job at Business Insider, a website that obsessively monitors, analyzes, and reports on technology, I could tell that the pace of change and the multiplication of risk were picking up speed.

Ford had the right overarching idea, as expressed by Bill Ford. It had the right messages, as expressed by Mark Fields (and later, by Jim Hackett). And it had the right people: designers, engineers, and managers who were technologists at heart. Ford even set up shop in Silicon Valley, to be closer to the action.

But this was a global enterprise that employed tens of thousands—and that had to keep its core business cranking. That meant building a million F-150 pickup trucks every year, no small task. Even if 100 percent of the company knew that enormous disruptions were afoot, at best only 10 to 20 percent of the company could focus on Ford disrupting itself.

Detroit tries to disrupt itself

The scrappy companies that were undertaking the disruption, of course, could go all out on the effort. For them, there was no point in striving to survive—the only acceptable outcome was to make it big, to hit the jackpot, or to vanish completely.

In late 2015, I went to Detroit to interview GM CEO Mary Barra. The first woman to lead a major automaker, Barra said all the right things about how the 100-plus-year-old carmaker, and by association the industry that it was part of, would ride out all the new threats.

At GM headquarters in the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit, sitting in Barra’s large and gracefully appointed but far from ostentatious office, I listened as she accepted the deluge of risk that was sweeping through the industry. Barra had spent her entire life at GM—her father had worked there, and GM was the only place she had ever worked.

"I can’t tell you what technology is going to exist in five years," she said. "All I can tell you is that if we sit here five years from today, it will be something that’s dramatically impacted the industry that we can’t even name right now."

I thought I was being lightly irreverent when I said to Barra that I hoped we could make a date to talk again then. But although she was amused, she wasn’t prepared to make light of what she was up against.

"We’re going to disrupt ourselves, and we are disrupting ourselves," she said, her voice unwavering after a nearly hourlong interview. "So we’re not trying to preserve a model of yesterday."

Ford’s Mark Fields unhesitatingly echoed Barra’s message. He came to Business Insider in March 2016, right before the New York auto show, and in an interview came right out with it. "There’s a lot of talk around technology companies disrupting the auto industry," he said. "Our approach is very simple: we’re disrupting ourselves." Before the year had ended, he would pledge Ford to get a fully self-driving car on the road by 2021.

To have the CEOs of the two largest U.S. automakers saying exactly the same thing within months of each other might sound like groupthink, but it isn’t. The auto industry has been unique not just in declaring a self-disruption and getting out ahead of the curve rhetorically, but in enacting that disruption as enthusiastically as possible, embedding a positive attitude toward new technology in everything it does.

For example, when Fields presided over the reveal of the new GT in early 2015, he stressed how advanced the supercar was—and that it was technology joined to emotion and history. Disruptive technologies made the new GT possible.

Don't forget the allure of an amazing car

And for what it’s worth, the GT is the pinnacle of Ford’s automotive technology. It is designed to go fast in the straight line and through the corners; crafted almost entirely from carbon fiber, the most advanced material in the carmaker’s manufacturing playbook; and powered by one of the most sophisticated engines Ford has ever built, the race-proven, turbocharged EcoBoost V-6. Styled to turn heads, on the street and on the track, it as an emblem, a new icon. Its reveal provided stirring evidence that Ford was back, and better than ever.

But it was also the culmination of a century of one type of thinking about cars. The GT was glorious. But all around it, the idea of a person in a machine going fast—the idea that was the animating spirit of the multi-trillion-dollar global auto industry—was being discarded.

In August 2016, Fields announced that Ford would have a small fleet of fully autonomous vehicles on the road by 2021, leapfrogging the more incremental approach to self-driving technology that Tesla and others were embracing. Both the established automakers and the newest of the new entrants anticipated that the driver would exit the stage in the future; at around the same time that Fields made his announcement, Uber rolled out its own driverless test fleet in Pittsburgh.

At one point, a year before the GT hit the floor at the 2015 Detroit auto show, I went on a drive with a company that offered seat time in some of the world’s most exotic and exciting cars. I sampled a Lamborghini, a Porsche, a Ferrari, a Maserati, an Aston Martin, and a Mercedes. My partner for the event was a former Ferrari owner, a young guy who knew and loved high-performance cars. We stopped several times during the day to switch vehicles. At around noon, the gorgeous machines were all lined up in the parking lot of a grocery store in the New Jersey suburbs. My partner had made money when a tech company he was part of was sold. He understood how fast things could change in the new century.

"Look," he said, gesturing toward the supercars, a few million bucks in the best the auto industry had to offer. "We aren’t going to see that for much longer."

Was he right? I wasn’t sure, even though I knew he was without question onto something. Everyone who built and sold cars for a living was trying to figure out what that something would mean. But for twenty-four hours in June 2016, we were going to forget all about disruptions and electric cars and self-driving vehicles and the twilight of the supercars. The best racing teams in the world were headed for a showdown at the toughest race in the world, and I knew I wasn’t the only one still excited by the raging machines, at an almost primordial level.

Read more about "Return to Glory" at matthewdebord.com.

Buy the book at Amazon.com.

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'So, do you want to see the car?': The story of the day that Tesla stunned the world (TSLA, F)

In early 2016, Ford was intensely preparing to stage a history-repeating assault on the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France.

With two teams and four new Ford GT race cars competing in both North America and Europe, the goal was to grab a win at the grueling endurance competition and remind the world of Ford's 1-2-3 triumph in 1966 over Ferrari — 50 years before.

But while Ford and Chip Ganassi Racing were battling it out on the track, another challenge was taking shape.

In California, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was preparing to pull the cover off his long-awaited Model 3 mass-market vehicle — a car intended to show the auto industry that Tesla was ready to take its disruption to a whole new level.

In this excerpt from Business Insider Senior Correspondent Matthew DeBord's book "Return to Glory: The Story of Ford's Revival and Victory in the Toughest Race in the World" (Grove Atlantic), we get a front-row seat at the Model 3 reveal — and watch as Ford and the rest of the 100-year-old car business try to respond.

And so it begins ...

On a balmy March evening in Los Angeles, just three months before the most advanced Ford race car ever built would take to the Circuit de la Sarthe in France, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk took to a stage at his electric-car start-up’s design center, just a few miles south of Hollywood and the American cinematic dream factory.

Musk was there to pull the cover off a dream that had nothing to do with movie magic. Instead, he sauntered onstage dressed entirely in black and, after some awkward jokes, made a few comments about the impending catastrophe of global warming—one of the multi-billionaire’s overriding personal preoccupations and the reason he bought into Tesla in 2004 after making $180 million when eBay acquired PayPal, the electronic payments service he had cofounded. He then proceeded to preside over the rollout of Tesla’s much-anticipated Model 3, a mass-market electric vehicle that would sell for $35,000 when it hit Tesla’s showrooms in 2017.

Tesla was already selling a pair of game-changing cars: the Model S sedan, which in its most advanced configuration, equipped with the “Ludicrous” acceleration mode, could scorch a zero-to-sixty run in less than three seconds, outrunning supercars from Ferrari and Lamborghini; and the Model X SUV, with its exotic, up-swinging “falcon wing” doors and “bioweapon defense mode” air-filtration system. But these long-range electric vehicles (EVs) sold for $100,000 and up, to a well-heeled elite, including Silicon Valley venture capitalists and titans of finance.

That certainly created useful cash flow for Tesla (if not profits), but it didn’t suit Musk’s grand vision, which was to accelerate humanity’s transition from the era of fossil fuels—an era that had filled the atmosphere with carbon, disrupting weather patterns, and making the planet hotter. In early December 2015, Musk gave a speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, in connection with the United Nations Climate Summit, in which he called governments’ reluctance to tax the generation of atmospheric carbon the “dumbest science experiment in history” and “madness.” He went on to call for a global carbon tax, as he had done several times before.

No chief executive of a traditional automaker would even consider giving a speech like the one Musk delivered, although several have raised the suggestion that car companies—as producers of a technology that alongside burning coal to generate electricity contributes much of the carbon in the atmosphere—should be part of the sweeping solution.

The multi-trillion-dollar global auto industry has found itself smack at the center of what can’t be responsibly characterized anymore as a debate. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the majority of car executives aren’t global-warming deniers, there are more than a billion vehicles on the roads worldwide, and automakers continue to build millions of new cars and trucks every year. If they stop, or attempt to radically convert to manufacturing vast fleets of Tesla-like vehicles, they’ll rapidly go bankrupt.

They are, however, not stupid. Gasoline is simply the most convenient fuel for their products currently. Almost without exception, the world’s car companies are trying to move in a Teslaesque direction, if haltingly and on a rather small scale at the moment.

Elon Musk and his vision of the future

Musk bought into Tesla, eventually displacing cofounder Martin Eberhard in an unpleasant management coup, specifically to attack what he considers to be the biggest problem facing humanity. But he didn’t want to be boring. He reasoned that a sexy, fast electric car—such as the original Roadster Tesla soon produced—would shake EVs free of their “glorified golf cart” stigma and convince both buyers and investors to fund the demise of the internal-combustion engine.

Tesla began selling stock to the public in 2010, at seventeen dollars per share. A few years later, the Model S was launched; Motor Trend would name it Car of the Year in 2013. Tesla had endured numerous near-death experiences prior to the IPO, including an episode in 2008 that brought the company just weeks from bankruptcy. But once the Model S started selling, the accolades began rolling in—the luxurious EV, with its brisk acceleration, sharply minimalist looks, and huge central dashboard touchscreen, was a hit with the automotive media. The stock went, as they say on Wall Street, parabolic; in 2014, it would flirt with $300 per share, ensuring early investors a return of around 1,200 percent.

The financials would pitch and yaw wildly over the next two years, as investors tried to figure out when, if ever, the carmaker would make money and whether its innovations, including an astonishing self-driving autopilot feature, would completely disrupt an auto industry that had been selling largely gas-burning cars, and lots of them, for over a century.

But on that early evening in March, Musk was a conquering hero, a South Africa–born heir apparent to Henry Ford and the late Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs. Musk’s other company, SpaceX, was taking care of another scope of his vision, the effort to make humans a “multi-planetary” species with a colony on Mars, the planet to which Musk said he would retire.

It is easy to understand why Musk, then forty-four, was a model for Robert Downey Jr.’s character Tony Stark in the "Iron Man" movies. He did cars. He did rockets. He even did solar energy in his role as the chairman of SolarCity, a company started by his cousins. (And acquired by Tesla in 2016 for $2.1 billion.) He was the superstar entrepreneur of Silicon Valley. Musk attacked huge problems head-on, like a technologist of old. And he was aware of just how quixotic his ambitions were. Starting a car company, he would say, is idiotic, and an electric-car company is idiocy squared.

An unprecedented number of preorders for the Model 3

What got Detroit’s attention that night wasn’t the Model 3 itself; the car had been much discussed for several years, and everyone knew what to expect in a smaller, less expensive Tesla. Rather, the star of the show was the preorder counter, displayed behind a bright red Model 3 on a huge screen on the stage.

Analysts had expected something like 150,000 Model 3s to be reserved, each with a $1,000 refundable deposit. By the time I took a photo of the counter at the event, it had crossed 174,000. In a month, 373,000 reservations would be logged, creating the potential for $13 billion to flow into Tesla’s needy coffers, assuming a relatively conservative average price of $35,000 for each sale. Who knows how many of those reservations will ultimately turn into sales? Even if only a quarter or a half of them do, it is still an impressive number and a testament to the potential demand.

"So, do you want to see the car?" Musk winkingly asked, before giving three preproduction versions of the car the stage.

A better question—and one that he would ask as the preorders surged—was, "How many of these cars can we actually build?"

The traditional auto industry is secretly obsessed with Tesla (and not-so-secretly obsessed in the first six months of 2017, when Tesla's market capitalization surged past $50 billion, topping Ford, GM, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles — the Big Three had become the Big Four). Not since Preston Tucker, an innovator of the 1950s whose own quixotic life was chronicled in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1988 film "Tucker: The Man and His Dream," had anyone so thoroughly captivated the iconic world of the American automobile.

The CEOs of major auto companies tend to be either hard-charging, sharp-elbowed "car guys" or technocratic bean counters. Occasionally a major change agent such as Alan Mulally will come along, but many chief executives got to the big chair after decades of loyal service.

After Mark Fields got the CEO job at Ford in 2014, he freely admitted that the company had bought a Tesla Model S, taken it apart, and put it back together again. He later said the company would do likewise with the Model X SUV.

But even by the secretive standards of Tesla fascination, the Model 3 preorder palooza was earth-shattering. From Dearborn to Toyota City, the automakers just couldn’t believe it. The astounding number of deposits showed the intense desire to join the club that the brand represented. The only meaningful comparison to draw was with Apple. In the auto industry, you could say that Ferrari held a similar mystique, but Ferrari didn’t have the ambition to dethrone the gas-burning engine or sell half a million cars a year. Tesla did, and it was sort of appalling to mainstream auto executives.

Traditional automakers work desperately hard to capture and retain customers, spending billions to convince them to stick with certain brands and to advance through vehicle hierarchies, from inexpensive mass-market cars to pricey luxury rides. What was astonishing about Tesla’s Model 3 launch was that hundreds of thousands of buyers were happy to give Tesla an open-ended, no-interest cash loan, with no meaningful guarantee beyond Musk’s word that the cars would arrive on time.

Musk’s promises had a poor track record. Both the Model S and the Model X had suffered from production delays and early quality-control problems. In fact, Musk admitted that Tesla had been guilty of "hubris" in designing and engineering the Model X, which had many complicated features that slowed the assembly line. The doors had to be completely redesigned at the eleventh hour. The second-row seats turned out to be so complicated that Tesla would eventually take the supplier off the job and engineer this component itself.

Later, quality-control glitches would appear. The entire Model S fleet was voluntarily recalled in December 2015 because a seat-belt assembly could fail. The initial production run of the Model X, several thousand vehicles, would also be recalled because the third-row seats could pitch forward in a crash.

Much earlier, there had been battery fires with the Model S, and Tesla had been compelled to design a shielding system for the bottom of the car to prevent punctures of the battery pack. Tesla’s advanced electronics and software, while game changing in many respects, were buggy in the way that Silicon Valley code typically is (the ritual is to release the software and fix it later). In an annual dependability survey by J. D. Power and Associates conducted in 2016, Tesla owners reported so many problems that Tesla finished in the bottom five, undercutting the narrative that its vehicles were redefining the ownership experience with rapid software updates.

Even though Musk admitted that the Model X SUV was so advanced that Tesla “probably shouldn’t have built it,” his boundless gumption still captivated the industry.

Musk calls his own shots

In the traditional auto industry, Musk had only one prominent naysayer, former GM product guru Bob Lutz, who had worked for BMW and for Chrysler under Lee Iacocca before coming to GM and straddling the pre- and post-bankruptcy companies. I talked to Lutz about Tesla on several occasions between 2014 and 2016—once at the Detroit auto show in January 2016, when he was preparing to reveal a new American-made supercar venture with onetime Tesla competitor Henrik Fisker—and he was always unflinchingly equal in his praise for Tesla’s cars and his disdain for Musk’s management of the company.

Lutz’s attitudes toward global warming were controversial. While not exactly a climate-science denier, he was skeptical that taking internal-combustion engines off the road and replacing them with more expensive and less versatile electric cars was a solution. But that wasn’t what shaped his negative views of Tesla— he actually didn’t think that Tesla was doing a very good job of running its business. In a sense, he and Musk were on the same page: the cars were simply too difficult to build.

But with Ford’s and GM’s stock prices languishing, even as both carmakers notched steady and impressive profits through 2014 and 2015, executives grumbled about how easy it was for Musk to sell additional Tesla stock, which the carmaker did in both 2015 and 2016, raising almost $2 billion in the process. And even though Detroit had been sweepingly reinvented by the financial crisis, the familiar infighting and territorialism that have always defined the auto industry hadn’t disappeared.

In the 1980s, Detroit had endured the Japanese arrival in force in the U.S. market. The Big Three had been forced to adapt, to become more efficient, and to see their companies as large manufacturing and management teams, “flat structure” organizations, where the lowliest assembly-line worker had the power to stop production if he spotted a problem. Sure, Toyota and Honda continued to be extremely hierarchical, in the Japanese business tradition. But when it came to actually building cars, the “relentless pursuit of perfection,” to borrow a famous tagline from Toyota’s Lexus luxury brand, was a mandate that Detroit had to accept. Unsurprisingly, customers preferred cars that always started, didn’t rust out in a matter of years, and could be passed down from generation to generation, Dad’s Honda Accord becoming Junior’s college car.

Musk was a different animal—a leader who called, seemingly, all his own shots. He was initially ridiculed when he appointed himself as Tesla’s product architect, while at the same time having an experienced designer, Franz von Holzhausen, from Mazda, for the real aesthetic work, and JB Straubel overseeing how the cars were engineered at the nuts-and-bolts level. But then the Model S arrived, and with it dropped jaws and widespread media accolades.

Musk didn’t have to fight through a bureaucracy—he was the bureaucracy, and at Tesla, bureaucracy was the enemy. So if Musk wanted to ignore structure, he just did. He had a hardworking communications team, but if he had something to say, he took to Twitter, often at odd hours and on weekends, sending reporters scrambling. He had hardworking engineers, but if he wanted to make a change to a Tesla vehicle, he made it.

In Tesla’s required financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company never failed to cite the so-called “great man” risk: without Musk, Tesla would be in big trouble. The CEOs of big car companies think they have power, and they do. But Musk had power of a different order, as well as lots of stress.

Ford's fights to keep up

By the time Ford was turning practice laps at Le Mans in early June 2016, Musk was running a company that was a decade old. And he was under as much pressure to innovate as everyone else in the industry. Ironically, Ford was probably better prepared to manage the transformation in mobility that Tesla was helping to usher in.

In the face of a massive disruption to the accepted way of doing business, scale can be an invaluable asset. At base, Musk’s company was all about demonstrating that there was a paying buyership for its type of vehicle, reversing the thinking that had followed the demise of GM’s EV1 project from the 1990s, which had brought the first mass-produced electric car to market, but only in a limited way, via leasing.

When GM decided to conclude the program and crush all the EV1s, save a few historical examples, it was widely assumed that electric cars were once again going to be at best a sideline of the auto industry. (GM’s decision inspired the film "Who Killed the Electric Car?" which alleged that the carmaker had acted more to preserve itself from an electric revolution than to dispense with a money-losing experiment.)

Ford’s angle on transportation in the twenty-first century was the preoccupation of Bill Ford, who, once Alan Mulally took over as CEO, could concentrate on delivering a deeply counterintuitive message: that the company we credit with creating the mass-market automobile wanted to curtail its dependence on four wheels and an engine in the future.

The idea was really quite logical. Ford would become a mobility provider. If you needed to own a car, Ford would build one, and Ford dealers would sell it to you—and Ford would lend you the money to buy it. But if you didn’t want to own a car, Ford would provide you with transportation. And if you wanted any aspect of your mobility experience to be more pleasant or efficient, Ford would create—or partner with other companies to create—the information corridors to make that happen.

Ford began to tackle this process in earnest around 2010, and Fields made it a prominent part of his leadership pitch once he became CEO. It was a good fit. Fields had always been a forward-looking leader. (But not forward-looking enough; he would be ousted by Ford's board of directors in May of 2017, as the carmaker's stock price lagged. His replacement, former Steelcase CEO Jim Hackett, was a close confidant of Bill Ford and would undertake the major change in Ford's story.)

Scale can be a strength when a company is being actively disrupted, but the classic theory on the subject—articulated by Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen in his seminal book "The Innovator’s Dilemma"—says that size can protect for only so long. And that’s because new entrants can innovate much more rapidly than incumbents, even if the established business is itself actively trying to innovate.

The core problem—an advantage, actually, for smaller, newer companies—is that the very things that insulate the established player prevent it from moving fast enough. The critical sticking point is failure. Big companies can afford to fail, but they can’t undertake the failure process rapidly enough. And unless their businesses don’t require much cash for research and development, as is the case with software-driven internet firms, they can’t afford to invest in hundreds of over-the-horizon efforts.

For one thing, there’s a disincentive for companies that already have scale to do small stuff; it’s more cost-effective for them to simply buy up smaller companies. And for another, they can be undermined by competitive threats that are enabled by the newest technologies.

Silicon Valley wants to eat Detroit's lunch

It’s this second threat that was generating the biggest risks for Ford and its rivals in 2016.

The ride-sharing service Uber, founded in 2009, came on the scene with a brash, sharp-elbowed CEO named Travis Kalanick aiming to eliminate the taxi business in big cities.

By the time the Ford GT race cars were getting their first taste of the Circuit de la Sarthe, Uber was valued at a staggering $65 billion and had just taken a $3.5 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, as the oil-rich nation sought to diversify beyond the natural resource that had transformed it into one of the world’s most influential and richest countries. (Tesla staged an impressive debit of self-driving technology in Pittsburgh in 2016, but in 2017, the company slid into crisis as workplace-culture issues dogged the startup and Kalanick was caught on video arguing with an Uber driver; the CEO later apologized, admitting that he need help overcoming the drawbacks his harsh style.)

Tesla shook up the traditional carmakers. But they could still figure out what Tesla was: an automaker with some high-tech credibility and electric motors, plus a charismatic leader. Uber was much harder to figure out. Pundits began to argue that with Uber, nobody—except for Uber drivers—would ever need to own a car again. And as self-driving cars accelerated their development, the drivers started to drop out of the picture. The future would consist of autonomous vehicles, owned as large fleets, appearing and disappearing as needed, dispatched by software.

Design, horsepower, speed, the automobile as an icon of freedom— that would all be relegated to the misty past, like stagecoaches and Conestoga wagons. All that would matter is that your pod-mobile appeared when summoned and that it moved you from point A to point B.

Automakers were far from sure that this—for them—dystopian future would come to pass, but they were determined to avoid a slide into irrelevance. GM began to move very aggressively in 2015 and 2016, investing $500 million in Uber’s competitor Lyft, buying up the assets of a mobility start-up called Sidecar, which had gone bankrupt, and most dramatically, buying an obscure self-driving outfit, Cruise Automation, for nearly $1 billion. By the end of 2016, Cruise’s self-driving technology would come to market under the GM banner, as the automaker began selling its Bolt EV, beating Tesla’s Model 3 by at least a year.

But Ford wasn’t hanging back. It created a small fleet of self-driving cars to perfect the technology, which by 2016 was mainly capable of letting drivers take their hands off the steering wheel for freeway driving, as long as they continued to monitor their vehicles. It was widely expected, however, that over the next decade, higher levels of autonomy would be rolled out, leading ultimately to the end of drivers behind the wheel.

The traditional auto industry is, in fact, pretty good at assessing risks. And the broadly held notion that it just wants to stick to the same old, same old, year after year, is simply false. The industry is far too competitive for anyone to avoid innovation; the carmakers that struggle to sell cars are the ones that are forced to starve their research-and-development budgets for too long.

The internal-combustion engine, introduced in the nineteenth century, had been perfected by the early twenty-first, through a process of continuous innovation undertaken by the global auto industry (the gazillion patents related to the internal-combustion engine were one of the reasons that critics often accused the industry of stalling on change).

In fact, a few start-ups in the early 2000s and 2010s were even trying to push the internal-combustion engine to breakthrough levels. A company called Transonic Combustion, which failed because it couldn’t make its technology adequately reliable, developed a fuel-injection system that upgraded gas-burning efficiency to unheard-of levels, with engines delivering 100 miles per gallon.

By early 2016, Ford felt awfully good about where it stood, in terms of preserving itself and embracing the future. The company even had an in-house futurist on staff, and had since before the financial crisis, to spot important trends before they became existential threats—or massive missed opportunities.

But as someone who had covered the company for a decade, and who had a front-row seat for everything happening in Silicon Valley thanks to my job at Business Insider, a website that obsessively monitors, analyzes, and reports on technology, I could tell that the pace of change and the multiplication of risk were picking up speed.

Ford had the right overarching idea, as expressed by Bill Ford. It had the right messages, as expressed by Mark Fields (and later, by Jim Hackett). And it had the right people: designers, engineers, and managers who were technologists at heart. Ford even set up shop in Silicon Valley, to be closer to the action.

But this was a global enterprise that employed tens of thousands—and that had to keep its core business cranking. That meant building a million F-150 pickup trucks every year, no small task. Even if 100 percent of the company knew that enormous disruptions were afoot, at best only 10 to 20 percent of the company could focus on Ford disrupting itself.

Detroit tries to disrupt itself

The scrappy companies that were undertaking the disruption, of course, could go all out on the effort. For them, there was no point in striving to survive—the only acceptable outcome was to make it big, to hit the jackpot, or to vanish completely.

In late 2015, I went to Detroit to interview GM CEO Mary Barra. The first woman to lead a major automaker, Barra said all the right things about how the 100-plus-year-old carmaker, and by association the industry that it was part of, would ride out all the new threats.

At GM headquarters in the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit, sitting in Barra’s large and gracefully appointed but far from ostentatious office, I listened as she accepted the deluge of risk that was sweeping through the industry. Barra had spent her entire life at GM—her father had worked there, and GM was the only place she had ever worked.

"I can’t tell you what technology is going to exist in five years," she said. "All I can tell you is that if we sit here five years from today, it will be something that’s dramatically impacted the industry that we can’t even name right now."

I thought I was being lightly irreverent when I said to Barra that I hoped we could make a date to talk again then. But although she was amused, she wasn’t prepared to make light of what she was up against.

"We’re going to disrupt ourselves, and we are disrupting ourselves," she said, her voice unwavering after a nearly hourlong interview. "So we’re not trying to preserve a model of yesterday."

Ford’s Mark Fields unhesitatingly echoed Barra’s message. He came to Business Insider in March 2016, right before the New York auto show, and in an interview came right out with it. "There’s a lot of talk around technology companies disrupting the auto industry," he said. "Our approach is very simple: we’re disrupting ourselves." Before the year had ended, he would pledge Ford to get a fully self-driving car on the road by 2021.

To have the CEOs of the two largest U.S. automakers saying exactly the same thing within months of each other might sound like groupthink, but it isn’t. The auto industry has been unique not just in declaring a self-disruption and getting out ahead of the curve rhetorically, but in enacting that disruption as enthusiastically as possible, embedding a positive attitude toward new technology in everything it does.

For example, when Fields presided over the reveal of the new GT in early 2015, he stressed how advanced the supercar was—and that it was technology joined to emotion and history. Disruptive technologies made the new GT possible.

Don't forget the allure of an amazing car

And for what it’s worth, the GT is the pinnacle of Ford’s automotive technology. It is designed to go fast in the straight line and through the corners; crafted almost entirely from carbon fiber, the most advanced material in the carmaker’s manufacturing playbook; and powered by one of the most sophisticated engines Ford has ever built, the race-proven, turbocharged EcoBoost V-6. Styled to turn heads, on the street and on the track, it as an emblem, a new icon. Its reveal provided stirring evidence that Ford was back, and better than ever.

But it was also the culmination of a century of one type of thinking about cars. The GT was glorious. But all around it, the idea of a person in a machine going fast—the idea that was the animating spirit of the multi-trillion-dollar global auto industry—was being discarded.

In August 2016, Fields announced that Ford would have a small fleet of fully autonomous vehicles on the road by 2021, leapfrogging the more incremental approach to self-driving technology that Tesla and others were embracing. Both the established automakers and the newest of the new entrants anticipated that the driver would exit the stage in the future; at around the same time that Fields made his announcement, Uber rolled out its own driverless test fleet in Pittsburgh.

At one point, a year before the GT hit the floor at the 2015 Detroit auto show, I went on a drive with a company that offered seat time in some of the world’s most exotic and exciting cars. I sampled a Lamborghini, a Porsche, a Ferrari, a Maserati, an Aston Martin, and a Mercedes. My partner for the event was a former Ferrari owner, a young guy who knew and loved high-performance cars. We stopped several times during the day to switch vehicles. At around noon, the gorgeous machines were all lined up in the parking lot of a grocery store in the New Jersey suburbs. My partner had made money when a tech company he was part of was sold. He understood how fast things could change in the new century.

"Look," he said, gesturing toward the supercars, a few million bucks in the best the auto industry had to offer. "We aren’t going to see that for much longer."

Was he right? I wasn’t sure, even though I knew he was without question onto something. Everyone who built and sold cars for a living was trying to figure out what that something would mean. But for twenty-four hours in June 2016, we were going to forget all about disruptions and electric cars and self-driving vehicles and the twilight of the supercars. The best racing teams in the world were headed for a showdown at the toughest race in the world, and I knew I wasn’t the only one still excited by the raging machines, at an almost primordial level.

Read more about "Return to Glory" at matthewdebord.com.

Buy the book at Amazon.com.

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