It's curious that Clayton Christensen has maintained that his theory does not apply to Tesla or electric vehicles generally. He views electrification as a sustaining technology for the automotive industry, rather than a disruptive. This is largely because his theory focuses on cheap technologies finding niches that then advance to take on more established technologies. He thinks if cheap golf carts take over cars that would be disruption, but not if a high end electric progressively becomes more affordable.
I do believe he is missing the point of what exactly is being disrupted. It is not cars per se, but the internal combustion engine and gasoline that is getting disrupted by little battery cells. Who would have thought that laptop batteries would come to imperil ICE and fossil fuels? Clearly, batteries are not sustaining technologies for ICE makers and the oil industry.
It is surprising that Christensen makes this mistake. Much of his book traces the evolution of hard drives. Hard drives go progressively smaller. This did not make mainframe computers go away. It only meant that with time even mainframes would incorporate smaller disk drives, even as the suppliers of larger disk drives went out of business. The analogy here is that a batter drive train is more like smaller disk drive than a mainframe computer. The outer shell of cars or computers may not be disrupted even as critical internal components are disrupted and fall into the dust bin of history. So I suspect that Christensen himself has particular blinders regarding EVs.
This I believe reflects poorly on his theory, in that it is not crisp enough to identify disruption in the face of other intellectual biases that a researcher may have. Indeed the point of such a theory should be to help practitioners get beyond their organizational blinders and see the disruption potential before it happens. It should not be used to discount a potential disruptor because it fails to meet a certain set of expectations of a given theory. Clayton made the same mistake with iPhones. He said it was a high end sustain technology for cell phone. Only in hindsight did Christensen recognize that the disruption was to PCs than to cell phones. People were willing to pay more for smart phone, not because it was a replacement for cell phones, but because it was a replacement for other computing devices that added enormous mobility. And yet PCs were much more powerful computers at the time. So PCs were clearly disrupted, not so much phones per se. Camera and film were also disrupted. So it a poor theory of disruption that can only recognize disruption after the fact. Christensen should be asking himself, if EVs are a potential disruptor, what exactly would it be disrupting? Put this way one can easily see many technologies at risk, and the incumbents which profit from them are also at risk.
Now the Gigafactory is mass producing cells. Every cell is displacing older technologies. The list of technologies and companies within range of this dreadnought is quite long, but this alien ship will keep firing with increasing speed.
