New car Quote by Ashlee Vance

““What Musk had done that the rival automakers missed or didn’t have the means to combat was turn Tesla into a lifestyle. It did not just sell someone a car. It sold them an image, a feeling they were tapping into the future, a relationship. Apple did the same thing decades ago with the Mac and then again with the iPod and iPhone. Even those who were not religious about their affiliation to Apple were sucked into its universe once they bought the hardware and downloaded software like iTunes. This sort of relationship is hard to pull off if you don’t control as much of the lifestyle as possible. PC makers that farmed their software out to Microsoft, their chips to Intel, and their design to Asia could never make machines as beautiful and as complete as Apple’s. They also could not respond in time as Apple took this expertise to new areas and hooked people on its applications. You can see Musk’s embrace of the car as lifestyle in Tesla’s abandonment of model years. Tesla does not designate cars as being 2014s or 2015s, and it also doesn’t have “all the 2014s in stock must go, go, go and make room for the new cars” sales. It produces the best Model S it can at the time, and that’s what the customer receives. This means that Tesla does not develop and hold on to a bunch of new features over the course of the year and then unleash them in a new model all at once. It adds features one by one to the manufacturing line when they’re ready. Some customers may be frustrated to miss out on a feature here and there. Tesla, however, manages to deliver most of the upgrades as software updates that everyone gets, providing current Model S owners with pleasant surprises.””

— Ashlee Vance