THE SWEET MUSK OF SUCCESS

Elon Musk has never been shy to shake things up in a major way. His whole career is based on his willingness to (literally) go the extra mile in being an inventor, innovator, and entrepreneur.

And now he done gone and did it again.

Tesla just announced two new electric vehicles. One is the Tesla Semi: a battery-powered truck to be produced in 2019. For any other company, this news in itself would be huge and a potential game-changer. For Tesla, however, it was the “boring” news of Musk’s press conference.*

Because, Steve Jobs-style, Musk had, oh, one more thing to announce. . .

To quote Bob Barker: A NEW CAR!!!!!!!

KING OF THE ROAD

1. This convertible ain’t your daddy’s electric ca . . . oh, right, electric cars haven’t been around that long. But still, this is a whole new beast from previous Tesla offerings, including the first Roadster in-car-nation from 2009. This Roadster will purportedly go 0 to 60 in only 1.9 SECONDS. That’s faster than it took to write this sentence.
2. It will have a top speed of . . . buckle your seat belts here (literally) . . . 250 miles per hour. Yeah, that’s right. But unless you’re a Formula 1 driver, though, YMMV.
3. It’s gonna cost more than that 2007 Civic you’re currently tootling around in. Just a wee bit more. Like, around $200,000, to start. But you can reserve a base model with a down payment of only 50 grand, so no worries.
4. It will be able to drive a whopping 620 miles on a single charge. That’s gotta be at least 50 trips or thereabouts to all your buddies’ houses to show off your new Roadster.
5. It’s only going to be available starting in 2020, which, while massively impressive from a technical standpoint, is still three years or so away. So you’ve got to be patient. Something so very, very fast is going to be slow coming.

PS . . .

*Now that we’ve got the sexy Roadster news out of the way, we’d be remiss to not point out that the boring stuff in life is often the most important. And the commercial Tesla Semi, with its planned 500-mile range on a single charge, does have the potential to revolutionize the freight transportation and distribution industries. This has MASSIVE environmental implications, as this chart from Business Insider on the role of trucks in America’s economy powerfully illustrates: