Tesla and the Jesus Car with Horace Dediu

Horace Dediu from Asymco & Clayton Christensen Institute is back with the second Asymco trilogy on our podcast to discuss the major topics that dominate the world of business and technology: modular revolution, startup strategy, Apple & cars. In the final part of the second trilogy, Horace discussed whether traditional companies such as Toyota and VW Group can tackle disruption coming from technology companies, the perspective of Tesla as an energy company but not an automotive company and what the iPhone equivalent of the car will look like.

Here are the interesting show notes and links to the discussion (with time-stamps included):

• Horace Dediu (@Asymco), senior fellow at Clayton Christensen Institute and his main site: Asymco.com and do check out Horace’s three podcasts: The Critical Path,  Asymcar and Significant Digits with Ben Bajarin which we highly recommend.
• The Automotive Industry moving forward [0:46]
  • I understand that you have visited Toyota and are also an avid reader to books relating to the history of transportation. I want to ask you in a series of questions. But to start off, I want to talk about Toyota. Toyota started out as a Japanese  automotive company and it clearly understand that it’s under siege from Google, Uber, Tesla & Apple with the rumored Project Titan. How would a traditional company such as Toyota or VW group cope with such disruption coming forward? [1:36]
  • I have heard many times that your issue with Tesla is that they are not innovating on the manufacturing and production lines. To me, Tesla is an energy company. I did not appreciate until I am working on self driving cars and its implications to logistics but the problem of energy is pretty important and the company has made leaps and bounds with their battery charging technology. Would it not be clear that they are actually disrupting the energy space rather than the automotive space? [12:30]
  • Recently, Benedict Evans pointed that the cars today are like feature phones integrating Android car and Apple car play. I asked Ben Bajarin who is recently on my show, and he thinks that Tesla is probably the best shot in getting to become the “iPhone” version for car.  A recent read on the book “Losing the Signal” by McNish and Silcof described how the blackberry executives were blindsided and called the iPhone, “The Jesus Phone”. What do you enivisage the “Jesus car” would be? [20:10]
  • Will disruption of the car happen when innovation coming from both high end and low end conditions similar to Apple in the smartphone industry? [25:39]

Podcast Information:

• Feed
• iTunes
• Google Play
• TuneIn
• Overcast FM
• SoundCloud
• Quibb
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+
• Linkedin
• Stitcher
• Acast

The show is hosted by Bernard Leong (@bleongcw) and are sponsored by Ideal Workspace (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) with their new Altizen Desk on Indiegogo (Twitter, Facebook, Medium). Also check out Ideal Workspace’s new standing desk, Altizen and sign up for their mailing list. Sound credits for the intro music: Taro Iwashiro, “The Beginning” from Red Cliff Soundtrack. 

Special Promo for IoT Asia Conference 2017: Innovation and value generation remain at the forefront of the 4th edition of IoT Asia conference which returns on 29th to 30th March at the Singapore EXPO.  Join the 3-track conference to learn about new developments and initiatives from thought-leaders and leading lights in the field. Use our promo code IOT7AASIA to get 10% off conference rates except Academic.