The industry has never known greater disruption than in the age of electrification, but those doing the disrupting have invariably struggled when it comes to the business of building cars.
For all the well-funded, starry-eyed and bushy-tailed start-ups over the past decade, only really one has become a household name.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where Tesla has succeeded where others have failed, but it lies somewhere in the combination of three things: being the first true mass-market electric car maker and thus being the leader and not the follower; building a cult-like following around the brand; and being belligerent in its approach to almost everything, accepting no convention as something that can’t be challenged.
