this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
764 points (96.5% liked)
Technology
59223 readers
3489 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Also, side note, why do these points always mention the engineers and designers doing the actual work, and almost never the assembly workers for example?
The challenge was to make people talk about it and to make them want one, and that required a vision more so than just solving the engineering challenges. Their choice to first make a sports car - the Roadster - didn’t come from the engineers.
Because electric cars were a relatively new concept that needed to be designed and prototyped. That’s a job done by engineers. Factory workers don’t really come in until mass production, after the engineering is done.
Okay, but my point was about changing people’s minds about it being cool and a product you’d want to own. Tesla’s strategy was to make a sports car (the first Roadster) to show that electric cars could compete with combustion engine cars and to make people want one.
The engineers who solved the challenges needed to achieve that didn’t come up with that vision - that came from the top. Of course, that was because those guys had the money and could therefore dictate the direction, but if they wouldn’t have made that choice electric cars would most likely be mass adopted quite a few years later. That’s what I’m talking about, and that’s why “engineers did the engineering work” isn’t an argument against my point.
Also, let’s be real; even now people talk about the engineers and designers being the driving force behind Tesla.
Divide and conquer by the rich. Pit white collar workers against blue collar workers so they don't collectively rise up against the real exploiters. White collar workers are told right from the start of university that they're on a better path and are better people than those bottom tier laborer serfs and that general attitude gets normalized even if you don't actually believe you're better, and it comes out without even explicitly intending to, which is precisely the point.