The auto industry has developed certain unwritten rules over the last hundred years or so. Got new technologies or features? Save them for the new model year. Have a new product announcement? Make it at a car show. Want a new product? That will be several years of development.
Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk treats most of these traditions as if they don’t exist,1 and for his trouble, he is rewarded with the kind of public adulation that no other auto executive could even hope for. The problem Musk faces is that not all of these “traditional” ways of doing things are ripe for disruption. Beaming new features to an already-sold Model S? Cool. Tweeting announcements and wasting as little energy as possible on the well-worn car show/comparison test/auto media circuit? Sure. Create a new car out of thin air? Um, no.
This is why Musk’s “D” announcement last night was basically pre-ordained for disappointment: As an automaker, Tesla is far more constrained in what it can do than many seem to believe. Rumors of a self-driving system, whipped into hysteria by Musk’s awed references to progress in artificial intelligence, materialized as a suite of safety systems that seem to barely differ from those already offered by several automakers.2