By
Erich Vieth on May 20th, 2009
If you want to know the latest on electric cars, read Katharine Mieszkowski’s “The Electric Cars are Coming!” at Salon.com. Yes, good things are on the way, but the article is framed around a long loud lament voiced by a woman who previously drove an EV1: “An American car company had a fantastic lead and threw it away.”
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About the Author
Erich Vieth is an iconoclastic attorney, musician and writer living in the Shaw neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri. He and his wife Anne Jay have two daughters, aged 9 and 11.
Whenever a disruptive new technology is brought to market, it is almost always a new start-up company that does the initial spade work. Big companies tend to sit on the sidelines, dragging their feet until they either: (a) buy the new company and absorb it into their high-volume production and distribution networks; or (b) are driven out of existence, as the new technology pushes the old technology to extinction. Examples of the latter include companies such as Polaroid, which dragged its feet when the new technology of digital photography threatened its dominant position in the instant photography market. Likewise, the music and newspaper industries have both been pulverized by the switch to downloadable content, because they opposed new technologies that threatened their antiquated content delivery systems. Compaq, IBM, AT&T and others, once dominant players in the PC market, were killed off by companies like Dell, which mastered the ability to offer custom computers at lower prices. Zenith, once a major producer of small electronics, saw its revenues tank after it failed to invest in digital technology.
With these examples in mind, consider GM & Chrysler, neither of which seem to have either the management wisdom nor the financial resources to invest in smart start-ups like Tesla Motors: extinction would seem their likely future, at least as far as electric vehicles are concerned.