Cabbies: Tavistock Place is not what will destroy you

This is a letter to taxi drivers. 

It's not going to argue about the merits of Tavistock Place, the Embankment cycle superhighway or the other things coming. You might not like them —you may resent the fact they represent changes to the city that you cannot control, but they won't destroy you.

You face an existential threat. Britain dodged one in the Battle of Britain; humanity dodged one in the Cold War. The dinosaurs encountered one and lost. You? You run the risk of being a historical note -like the Viking colony of Greenland. More likely, the brand of the black cab will remain, just like those other icons: the routemaster bus, policemen with helmets too: something for the tourists to have on postcards and tea-towels.

What is this existential threat? If you thought "Uber" you'd be getting warm —but its more: it's the Internet and the devices attached to it.

When was the last time you popped out to rent a video or a DVD? Do you ever reminisce about going to the video rental store as you sit down in front of BBC iPlayer, Netflix, or Amazon? Do you still take photographs on a camera with a roll of film? If so —you can't take them down to a local camera shop to get printed —that shop will be gone. Along with the record shop and possibly the bookshop. 

They faced the existential threat of The Internet and lost.

Nobody set out to destroy those shops on the high street; it just happened. The new companies brought new opportunities to people, and we all embraced them; those stores were simply collateral damage. 

Thats what threatens you. Not just Uber, but the other companies building the stuff that Uber depends on. Uber needs Apple and google for the smartphones. Apple and google need users attached to their phones. Everyone driving is lost revenue, to these companies. And when you look at how much time people -especially in the US- spend in cars, that's a lot of lost revenue. And what are google working on now? Autonomous cars.

Uber are now valued at more than General Motors. That way more than if they took every single taxi journey on the planet and got 25% commission on that ride. So why the valuation? It's because Uber have general motors in their sights —along with Ford, VW/Audi, and the other car companies.

Uber have a simple ambition: to get the money everyone spends on buying and running cars. Why own one when you have a phone, and whenever you wave it, a car appears? It's the magic wand of motoring. No more need to worry about parking by your house, at your destination. No more maintaining it. And, assuming it's electric: no need to worry about range. You'll tell uber your destination, and they'll bring up a car with the range. If something goes wrong, well, Uber can send a replacement out to meet up. And it'll be their problem to worry about charging points, having vehicles ready at pickup etc.

To Uber then, you may be today's competitor —but you are a stepping stone to their greater goal: to replace today's car manufacturers.

Apple and google? They don't care about you one way or the other. But the phones, the cars they work on, the satnav maps they provide —that's the underlying technology that's threatening your business. And there's nothing you can do about that.

It's not just the scale of these companies you have to fear —it's their growing political power. The cash reserves Uber has means that they can start funding the election campaigns of US politicians. Once they do that, Taxi Licensing Authorities in the relevant cities are going to have anything they've done to block uber reversed, while legislation enabling self-driving cars gets pushed through.

In the UK, London is the big target for Uber: you've got the money, you've got the journeys, and, in the centre, an interesting mix of public transport and high-density destinations they can aim for. Your livelihoods. Get that cash flowing, keep the funders happy, destroy their direct competitors (e.g Lyft), and build a future for a transport company bigger than GM which has no drivers whatsoever.

So what can you do? How do you face down this existential threat?

That's a problem which you and your organisations —like the LTDA— have to worry about. 

It is probably the greatest threat you've ever encountered: it's got the car companies scared, and you've never managed that. 

Get together. Get out your phones and arrange a meeting —not Nokia phones, obviously— they lost to Apple and Google. Drive to that meeting past the streets that had video shops, record shops and booksellers. If you see an Uber driving in a crash, use the camera on your phone, post up the image —but spare a moment's thought to all those people who loved cameras and made a living selling them and the developing and printing business. But get together with your colleagues and work out how to survive.

Can you survive?

Maybe a better question is how long can you survive —and what help do you need to achieve this?

TfL are a possible ally. But you need a compelling vision of a real Taxi for the 21st century: one that doesn't pollute, one that recharges at taxi stands, one that is integrated in a world of booking by phone, touch to pay, co-ordinated booking systems with handoff between you and other cabbies. You might even think about changes to the pricing model.

TfL are also an enemy. It's not just their licensing of minicab drivers, or the fact that they are allowed into the city centre for near nothing, it's their sheer inertia and lack of innovation. You need to take the lead there —but it has to be compelling. "Like it was before Uber" is like a  VHS shop saying "like it was before iPlayer". That time is gone.

You might find the Uber drivers can be your allies here. They are in even more trouble than you. They're not employees of Uber: they are expenses —and there is no space for them in Uber's long-term vision. Start getting them to unionise, to demand salaries and rights, and get TfL to set those minimum standards, and maybe it will level the playing field. 

You need to keep them out the bus lanes. Uber, Google, Tesla and others have their autonomous car's LIDAR scanners scoping them out already; in their home cities, bus lane plans are on hold for this very reason.

Which brings this essay back to us: the cyclists. 

We are not the ones who will destroy your very livelihood.

You may look at changes in the city, at the Junctions of Death, along the Embankment, at Tavistock place, and elsewhere —and resent this change, a change to the city you love and which you can't control. Maybe so: but they are coming so that Londoners on bicycles can reach their destination alive.

None of those cyclists are building autonomous cars with a vision of taking over from the car companies, crushing your business as a stepping stone or a mere side-effect of the vision.

Protest about the changes if you want. Put money into a lawsuit over a conversion of what was essentially coach parking into a safe mass transport option if it makes you feel better. Complain about the cyclists whenever you get a journalist, a councillor or an MP in the back of the vehicle. Go to TfL and try to bully them into changing their plans. But in doing so, you are not only getting distracted from what really is going to destroy you: you are using up money, time and political capital which you need for your fight for your very survival

Maybe, just maybe, cyclist could even be allies.

Do you think we are happy that autonomous driving tests don't seem to include cyclists? Do you think we are happy that Nissan and Tesla want their car in bus lanes? Do you think, as we cycle round Westminster looking for one of its six cycle racks that we are pleased to see recharge docks in a part of the city where the congestion charge exempts them?

At the same time: we want to set off on a journey knowing we will get their alive. We want our children to be able to cycle to school and not worry about them. We will fight tooth-and-nail to preserve what little bits of safe infrastructure TfL and some of the councils are slowly adding to the city. Because we know what matters to us: our lives

Prepare to fight the electric motoring lobby

It's easy to view "the motoring lobby" as one vast mass of lobbyists, all pushing for the same thing: more roads, cheaper fuel, no parking/waiting/loading restrictions, no road use charges (c-zone, bridges), no speed tickets, etc. And of course: no "unrealistic" pollution controls, such as EURO6 diesel testing in real-world scenarios.

That's a simplistic view —and by identifying the different groups and their agendas, it helps to recognise the threats and opportunities.

Freight Transport Association (and their mouthpiece fair fuel UK): these want the £15B in road upgrades, and may be the main beneficiaries. Along with the fuel escalator freeze and raising of HGV speed limits on single carriageway roads, they're really getting their way these days. The FTA have a conflict of interest related to tipper-truck killings in London. Do they admit that the tipper truck industry, with its pay-per-delivery business model and utter lack of enforced regulation is broken, that more regulation is needed. Or do they blame the cyclists. Take a guess.

HGV truck drivers are, long-term, fucked. Autonomous driving will be easier to roll out on motorways due to the simpler road structure. Given the tangible safety benefits of self-driving trucks versus truck drivers on illegal 18 hour shifts watching iPlayer videos to keep awake —legislation legalising autonomous trucks will target motorways first.  The FTA members own those near-motorway distribution centres, and if they can reduce costs by eliminating those truck drivers, will gain a better return on investment that individual commuters. Destroying those truck driver jobs is going to be a traumatic change for those employees, especially in the US, where its the #1 job in many states. Should the cycling campaigns care? Maybe they should support roll-out of autonomous HGVs as fast as possible, even to the extent of setting a timetable for banning manual trucks.

Uber. Uber want to be able to run the world's largest minicab system without the need to pay tax or perform any oversight of their staff. They'd love to get into bus lanes in London, as Addison Lee desire. They benefit from the fact that there's no per-mile billing of car use in cities. If, say, TfL and other regulatory bodies did use GPS unit to (a) add some such taxation and (b) charge more when breaking the speed limit, we'd see a more realistic cost model along with elimination of that problem which exists outside london: aggressive minicab drivers trying to drive at 40 mph in a shared use bus lane. The licensing authorities should also be more aggressive about insurance. Ideally, they'd actually have some fitness to drive standard —but we know that isn't coming.

Uber drivers are, long-term, fucked. Uber has no loyalty to their "associates" and are funding research in self-driving cars because it will keep their costs down and customers happy. Should we care? Yes, if its goal is increasing the number of vehicles on the road, and if Uber want to get those cars into bus lanes.

The LTDA. These are the representative of everyone who resents a millimetre of space being allocated to survivable cycling in the city. Their view is that they've got a livelihood to maintain, and it is threatened by Uber, congestion, and every attempt to make cities better to live in. The addison lee protests shows that there is common grounds with cyclists over defending bus lanes —but that was because of mutual interest. They don't see the same way about keeping cyclists in lanes away from themselves, or in reducing congestion and pollution by getting people to cycle. A militant organisation with discreet backing from their OMIL users in canary wharf and elsewhere.

Taxi drivers are, long-term, fucked. Self-driving cars will take their jobs away too. As somewhat independent drivers, they don't have their employer actively working to eliminate their jobs (contrast with: Uber, FTA), but the same technical trends hurt them. Short term, they are crippled, especially in London, by the cars they are required to drive. That's the cause of a lot of diesel pollution in inner London —the taxis that they are forced to use. TfL and others need to think hard about how to move them to electric/hybrid. Where there is an opportunity there it may be to work on inductive charging in taxi bays. Rather than have the taxis sit their with their diesel engines running, poisoning the air outside train stations, hospitals and other places, those could be charge points.  Or they could embrace hydrogen fuel early: you don't need nationwide fuel infrastructure for London's taxis, just a few dedicated stations which they can visit.  Yet to think about things like that needs the LTDA and peers to lift their heads out of the daily mail, stop cutting op the cyclists, and think about the future.

SMMT. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders want to sell more cars in the UK. That's all they give a fuck about, and anything related to urban pollution is something they pretend their current cars address —and future cars address even better —including EURO6 diesels. Same goes for safety: future cars won't kill people.

If the dieselgate scandal grows their stance will be predictable —offer owners of dirty diesel government kickbacks/reduced tax on new models. We need to be prepared to respond to that by demanding that diesel owners get the same discount on new bicycles. Want to turn in a diesel car for £1000 of a new car? The owners should get the same government cash to buy bicycles for the whole family, or a season ticket from Woking to central london for a year.

The SMMT are keeping so quiet on dieselgate —they are clearly hoping it will blow over and people will keep buying today's cars.

Where SMMT are weak is that 2016 will be a stupid year to buy a car, especially a diesel one. The next generation of engines are going to have to be hybrid petrol or electric —dieselgate has shown that. Today's electric cars have atrocious depreciation, but Tesla's future models promise to bring costs down. If you want a new car, hold off until then.

Equally critically, self-driving cars will transform what a a car is. Buy a 2016 car and you will have to  drive it yourself. Put off buying a new car for 2-3 years, and you'll have one that drives for you. That's fundamentally different in a way that today's self-parking and lane-tracking models won't come close to competing with. A new car will be obsolete as fast as a windows phone. So will older cars —but if you let them depreciate more, you can put aside money for the new models. Or just buy a 2016 model at a massive discount.

The SMMT dare not admit this, because they depend on sales today. They want their customers to buy a new car in 2016, —and then upgrade to a self-driving one in 2018.

A key problem they have is demographics. Their real customers are getting older; the younger generations are the ones most fucked by global warming -and the most likely to want to not make things worse. That trend towards urban living is even more disastrous. If you live in the inner city, you don't need to commute by car, you don't have space for one anyway. And in particular, you don't have the need to own a short-range commute-only electric car, or the driveway or garage needed to charge the car overnight. Car clubs and maybe weekend rentals are all these people need, which can free up space in the cities. That's space which is going to be fought over. We need to make sure that it goes towards cycling and not charge points or dedicated lanes for electric cars.

The current car retailers are, long term, fucked on a number of fronts. As well as demographics, Tesla have shown that they aren't needed at all. Why go through an independent dealer when you can go straight to the manufacturer? No matter how hard the dealers talk about how they care more, how they offer independence and servicing, online shopping and continuously integrated monitoring and maintenance changes the purchasing and maintenance story. As will self-driving cars. Why drop a car off for repairs when your tesla is booked in for a charge and service at 4am to 6am on a Tuesday evening? It can go and do that itself and a Tesla station 50 miles away. You just don't need those local dealers any more.

The european car manufacturers. These are in trouble but can survive if they adapt fast. They've focused on diesel as the solution, because they know how to make engines, and think they can keep tweaking them. Dieselgate has given the game away. Now they need to play catch-up with tesla and the Japanese manufactures. They're pushing hydrogen powered cars as the future, as it retains those old skills: engines. But it needs a whole new infrastructure in fuelling cars to be rolled out. They'll be asking for government cash to do this: we need to make a better case for uses of the money.

Again, demographics threatens them. They need to keep people commuting from the suburbs to the towns. And there they are also their own worst enemy. Congestion destroys the value in driving. And no matter how hard Audi and others claim their Urban SUVs make being stuck in a traffic jam fun, it isn't.

To survive there they need autonomous driving to make those hours stuck in jams useful. They need to make sure there are parking places in the city for those commuters, short-stay parking outside shops, school runs where you can drop your kids off.

Anything which changes cities for walking, cycling and public transport threatens their very existence. We have no common ground here —we are competing for the same roadspace.

Anything which threatens urban car use threatens them. ULEZ zones, especially any that block out rigged EURO6 diesel engines will say "you can't drive here". Congestion zones rolled out across more inner cities will do for them what they've done for London; made driving into the city centres a luxury. 20 mph limits remove even the illusion that driving in a city is fun, no matter what the adverts say. Expanded resident parking zones (hello Bristol!) even making parking a premium option. It's not a coincidence that the people who hate RPZ parking hate 20 mph zones, and that it's the commute-by-car suburbs who are most up in arms about it.

The secondary motor industry. The petrol stations, the Halfords of this world; the cheaper-than the the approved-retailer garages. They are fucked already. Improving fuel economy (when real) reduces visits to petrol stations. While congestion may increase fuel use, hybrid cars kills that, and if it suppresses driving, even conventional engine'd vehicles will use less. The increasing technical sophistication of modern engines and cars means that home-maintenance is dying —look at Halford's numbers to see this. Look at how those shops selling aftermarket car stereos and alarms have gone. Fucked, all of them.

Common ground? Halford's have embraced cycling. Petrol stations? The supermarkets have fucked them. There are other uses of that city space.

Where we have a new threat is the electric motoring lobby.

These are the car companies sluggishly embracing electric power; seeing it as the way to get round restrictions on urban car use which will be rolled out for pollution reasons. They've gone to central government for cash for the factories, they've gone to central government for the cash-backs on overpriced 2nd cars —and you can be sure they are now going after local governments for special treatment too.

Because it doesn't matter what engine type you have —it still takes the same amount of time to sit in the same traffic jam.

That's why they have their greedy eyes on the bus lanes. There's room for more cars there, and if you can drive in them, you get a tangible benefit in commuter times, in exchange for a car that depreciates faster than a Fiat Pinto. If your car is worthless in five years, you wan't to use that car every day. And of course, with a range of 100 miles that will only decrease over time, that commute is essential to getting those miles in.

TfL are against it, so are Edinburgh Council.

What the electric car lobby can do is brief the press, which is what they do

• The register: "one trick TfL hasn’t tried – and really should – would be allowing electric cars to drive in bus lanes. "
• The daily telegraph: "Drivers of electric cars could use bus lanes and park for free under government plans."
• Renault, "Leading cities should do more to encourage the use of electric cars by investing in charging facilities and allowing zero emission vehicles to use bus lanes, says the head of Renault UK".

They also get to the politicians, where they can say "we've invested so much, you've invested so much —let's open up the bus lanes".

They've clearly got to Zac Goldsmith, who now thinks he can retain some green credentials while appealing to the suburban driving voter.

This needs be stamped on fast —as what happens in London will serve as a role model for the rest of Britain.

At least here Oslo is now providing an example of why not. Even though the number of electric cars is <35K, they're filling up the bus lanes enough for their privileges to be slowly reverted, and now they have a plan to make the city centre car free. Those can be used as as arguments, along with the same one used by central government to slash funding for all renewable energy sources, "the cost of electric cars has fallen enough they don't need subsidies"

Even so, those bus lanes will remain a juicy target. For the new electric motoring lobby, and perhaps companies like google and uber, who will be able to say "autonomous cars can replace buses'

That's already happening in the US, where a bus lane near google is being blocked because it won't be needed. You can be confident Google, Tesla, Uber and others did a lot of lobbying there. —and they'll be doing the same in the UK.

What can we do?

1. There's common cause with the taxi drivers again. They may hate the cyclists, but they hate Uber more.  Some protests outside Zac Goldsmith election events may get that point across -and with both cyclists and taxi drivers there, it'll appear less of a single special interest group protesting.
2. Ask for the electric car and diesel replacement money. Now. Put out press releases saying "if the government is planning any funding to replace dirty diesels, people should be allowed to buy bicycles and public transport season tickets with it.". Mention the season tickets, so anyone who commutes from south london from distances too far to cycle will be supportive of the idea.
3. Have quotes ready for anyone in the press who is briefed by the electric car lobby. The TfL and EDC papers are good —they are independent data which shows that bus passengers are hurt as much as cyclists.
4. Finally, it highlights why bus lanes cannot be considered cycling infrastructure. They last only as long as the next mayor of a city. The embankment bike lanes, the bridge crossings -they will endure. Bus lanes: they have to be fought for, again and again —just so cyclists have the right to cycle behind a diesel taxi with a bus up their arse.

Tesla vs Dinosaurs, the new Apple vs Nokia

We recently argued that car manufacturers were essentially engine manufacturers, or more precisely, engine factory manufacturers —and that e-cars rendered  obsolete their core skills

1. Designing petrol/diesel engines that deliver "acceptable" performance, fuel economy and pollution numbers, engines that are cost-effective to manufacture.
2. Designing manufacturable vehicles around these engines, with the features needed to allow that engine to translate into movement: transmission, steering, braking, air intakes, exhausts, cooling.
3. Having a cost-effective supply chain with 3rd party suppliers capable of on-demand supply of everything needed for those vehicles.
4. A service chain capable of bringing in the cars & their motors for local service, with supplies available on a timely basis. Servicing and parts are a long-term revenue stream, especially pre-emptive annual services.

We also claimed the centre of the automotive universe had moved from Detroit and Southern Germany to Silicon valley

To back this up

1. Ford announce their "innovation center" in Silicon Valley. Google is sucking them into a new orbit. 
2. More press on the "surge" of electric cars, motor manufacturers saying "more must be done to encourage this". Except in the NL, where the number sold actually fell. In a city with safe cycling and functional public transport, electric cars are a distraction.
3. Schroeders publish an investment analysis which argues that Peak Car has arrived in the west. Sales in the EU US and elsewhere will be replacements, especially to the (ageing) baby boomers, who will need autonomous vehicles to adapt to their age and to introduce planned obsolescence to vehicles that would otherwise outlast their remaining years.
4. The Register review a Tesla Model D, a four-door family hatchback e-car that can out accelerate a Ferrari if desired. A car whose per-wheel motors under software control deliver optimal traction for the conditions and operation. A car whose large battery delivers range; a battery the car is built around for handling. The reviewer notes that a Nissan Leaf has an out and back "journey range" of 25 miles. The Tesla: 200. Out and back trips work. No more plugging in to recharge every night.
5. The register compare it to the Porsche Panamera "c-zone exempt" hybrid and say you'd only choose the latter if you cared about the branding . Their Panamera view highlights how Porsche are behind in battery engineering, and have a convoluted mechanical transmission mode for performance alongside 
6. The register review a "Renault Twizzy" e-car and sneer at its sheer uselessness.
7. Tesla push-out an over-the-air software update their P85D cars that cut the 0-60 speed from 3.2s to 3.1s, While this number is fucking irrelevant except as a status symbol amongst the wealthy, the fact that Tesla can do this upgrade in software tells Porsche, BMW, Ferrari: this is the future. The fact that they push it out to all their existing customers adds insult to the injury. They also release a youtube video showing how their per-wheel electric drive delivers better snow traction than "all-wheel drive", just to let their competitors SUV units know that they are next.

Tesla have shown that the core skills of the future are radically different:

1. Designing batteries which charge fast, hold charge across temperatures, can discharge on demand.
2. Designing charging systems to charge those batteries fast.
3. Building out the charging infrastructure. Whereas the existing motor industry demands more government concessions: free parking for e-cars, bus-lane access, etc. Tesla build performance charging stations as their solution to the range problem. With cars that can do 300-400 miles per charge, Tesla don't need that many, especially if a 15-30 minute recharge is all that is needed.
4. Designing full size, everyday cars which make the battery an integral part of the vehicle, a vehicle built from the groundup around motors which can provide per-wheel traction and 0.60 performance on a par with even more expensive sports cars. 
5. Integrating battery charge management with instrumented vehicles and wireless communications, so that giving all owners of the P85D car a performance boost is an automatic feature "Good morning! your car just got faster"

As a result, the Tesla model S wins the best ranking ever for a car by the US Consumer Reviews magazine.

The existing manufacturers, the dinosaurs, have a problem. Their existing plant is obsolete, their existing skill base obsolete. And they are not the cool places to work for if you want to build future transports. Would you rather help Renault do the Renault Twizzy 2 or go to Tesla, help build their next cars, and maybe earn a sabbatical on Space-X to work on space launcher management.

The existing car manufacturers are the new Nokias.

1. They need to recuperate the sunk costs of those factories by continuing to build  and sell p- and -d cars. 
2. They need to sell replacement cars to their declining customer base in the west
3. They know that most cars are used daily for short-range commutes
4. They know that pollution and congestion means that p-car and d-cars are being viewed as unwelcome in modern cities.
5. They have to target the emerging economies with variants of their existing models, using the hand-me-down factories.

So they've all had the same idea: "let's sell electric cars as the number two car in a two-car household! One they charge up every night and use for commutes. We can then sell the "open-road-luxury tourer/crossover SUV" as the long-range toy!"

Except they've been so good at producing small petrol cars that they can't produce e-cars to compete. They have to keep costs down by (a) retrofitting the batteries and electric motors into vehicles that are built for combustion engines with transmissions, exhausts, air intakes and the like, and (b) skimping money on batteries.

Fitting small batteries keeps costs down, and while it meets the range of "most" journeys, it adds journey anxiety, —and is still very, very expensive. Furthermore, e-cars still have a key disadvantage. If you are driving one you still end up in stationary traffic wondering where you will park that day. Every evening you need to remember to plug it in somewhere to charge.

So what do the manufacturers do? They send their lobbyists to the government and say "we need lots of charging points for our limited range vehicles", "we need money to help build battery factories", "we need you to subsidise every e-car otherwise they won't compete with the combustion cars (dinocar?) we make", and of course "can we let them drive down bus lanes?"

Now consider

1. Nokia's most successful phone. While it helped the developing countries, it did nothing for Nokia, which now only exist as a unit within Microsoft. 
2. Apple, who in sheer volume of smart phones sold do not dominate the market, make 50-70% profit on an iphone, and the majority of the smart phone profits.
3. Apple, despite selling only a fraction as many laptops as the PC vendors, take all the profit from that business.

Apple have shown that if you can produce the most compelling products —you can get the majority of the profits. And that technology and its packaging lets them do it in the markets they compete in.

Tesla have the potential to do something similar —especially if they can move fast, to be the rapid mammal against the lumbering sauropods.

You can talk about e-cars and people will say "they are too expensive", to which you can agree "yes, those 20-mile range leaf toys are useless all round." Irrespective of motor type, it's the wrong transport option for a city. And with such limited range, its useless outside of a city. Which makes them fundamentally useless.

There's always the hybrid option, "the best of both worlds". For today's car manufacturers, it leverages their existing skills in engine and transmissions, and adds a battery and regenerative braking to it. But go look at that Porsche Panamera review and think "nobody would seriously design a vehicle like this if they had a clean slate". A petrol engine and transmission, as well as a battery and motors? At least Toyota have pure electric motor transmission in their Prius designs. 

Hybrid cars like the Prius may compensate for the inability of the existing car manufacturers to produce compelling electric cars, but all they are doing is retaining all the limitations of a combustion engine (engine block, cooling, lubrication, fuelling, exhaust, pollution management, serviceability) and adding the problems of an e-car (battery placement and management, motor management, effective regenerative braking). And, by having both kinds of engine in the same vehicle, your luggage capacity is in trouble: the longer the electric range, the less stuff you can carry.

It's a stop-gap solution for companies that aren't in a position to go fully electric.

But it is all they can do while they struggle to catch up. They need to build the skills Tesla has, build the manufacturing plant and supply chain, the software for managing engines and batteries and the experience in building vehicles out of them —experience where Tesla are now three cycles ahead on a development process that is iterating far faster than modern "5-7 year" car model cycles. They also have a sales channel, the dealership model, that is no longer relevant in a world of online sales, apple-style direct sales stores and continuously instrumented vehicles. Yet that dealer channel is one of their assets they don't dare abandon, because without it, they can't keep reselling their existing models.

Which brings this article back to the subject of peak car.

Today's manufacturers, the dinosaurs, need to resell cars to their existing customers at a 1:1 rate. Households moving from two cars to one don't do that. They aren't in a position to make or sell electric cars at the price point they sell cars for today, low-end electric cars suck and hybrid cars are clearly stop-gap toys. 

They are in trouble. Nokia management holding an iPhone saying "what are we going to do now?", while a subordinate says "we still have the market share!"

Tesla don't need that market share.

Tesla don't need 1:1 replacement sales of the existing automobile fleet to keep their plant busy and repay massive government loans.

What Tesla need is what Apple has: the profitable bit of the business. 

Which explains how they are working.  They are producing cars that get great consumer reviews. Now, rather than go down to that "e-car for the commute" business, they've gone up to compete with the sports cars, creating a brand image. Tesla are making Tesla cars desirable, with the fact that they electric an incidental detail; no more relevant than whether its a petrol or diesel engine in a BMW 5-series. What you are buying the car for is not the ability to recharge it after 20 miles, but the ability to fill it with luggage, your entire family, then go for a long journey —overtaking those BMW 5-series cars you get stuck behind when needed.

Nokia: meet Apple

Dinosaurs: that little thing at your feet? It's called a mammal.

Combustion engine manufacturers? We've got some bad news

Incidentally, Tesla have two charging stations in South Gloucestershire. One close to the M4/M5 Cribbs Causeway interchange, one off the A4174 and in range of those north-fringe commuters who make the mistake of living somewhere in extended-M4/M5 congestion commute zone.