Is dash design a marketing expense or an R&D expense?
Some believe that as vehicles become more autonomous the vehicles that win in the market will be the ones that provide the best entertainment venue. A part of that is the sound stage.
Here are pictures of personal preference best non Tesla dash (MB) vs Model 3
Which has more design expense as models permutate?
Which is a better sound stage?
Which would you have more success with if you were responsible for acoustic design?
When the patented slit air duct came out, I thought interesting in a technical way. Wondered if reliability would be improved with aging.
Just now am recognizing it as a huge signal to noise advantage as an entertainment stage.
This vent IP seems like a Tesla advantage during the transition to autonomous vehicles. A gap that will not be closed for 17 years - persistent gap on an important customer experience parameter.
It also reduces the design expense of new vehicles.
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First Mover Advantages are a Function of Number of Variables (Complexity of the new field) and are not a Universal Constant
Executive Summary:
Everyone knows first mover advantages are real, but they value these advantages based on their life experiences - what that have seen. Specifically, how long has it typically taken to close the gap. They treat this delay as a constant (K), as they remember in this fashion, "It takes about this long."
They treat first mover advantages as a Universal Constant, when in fact first mover advantages are not a constant. First mover advantages are a function of the number of variables in the new field - "How many things are changing?"
Considering TSLA first mover advantages, they are in many fields with many parameters.
The market has likely underestimated TSLA first mover advantages by a factor of 5. (I like to say "order of magnitude" because it is fun to say, but I think a "half an order of magnitude" is more accurate. Not as fun to say.)
End Executive Summary.
My training is in Mechanical Engineering, after slide rules and before computational fluid dynamics (CFD). A key part of undergraduate was finding the punch card machine that no one knew about under the stairwell, somewhere. Then making sure you double banded the stack of cards, so that you did not drop them and lose the order, on the way to computer hub where you put them in a pigeon hole. They would run the cards and in the afternoon you would get your deck back with some green and white tractor paper with results.
Key point: The difference between Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering is that their math worked. If we were good to 20%, we could use it.
So in experimental fluid mechanics one would write an equation: Answer = f (a,b,c,d,e,f,g, & h), which means "function of" all those variables. Then we would do an experiment that would create families of curves for each of the variables to figure out the answer.
A professor once said, "To get a patent, you don't have to be the smartest. You have to be the first."
Someone said that "patents occur in the fertile ground between two well established fields, as few people know how to work there. It is unexplored."
If you look at TSLA and the Intellectual Property (IP) they have generated while solving the problems that cross many fields to make an autonomous electric vehicle with usefully power dense batteries and heating systems that work, there are a lot of field boundaries (dashboard design included acoustics, air bags, crash safety (front and side crumple), vibration, stiffness, and cooling air distribution, reliability, ID signal to noise for entertainment).
- It is a complex task.
- Every time you experience a new problem in the new margin between old fields, you create Intellectual Property in patent and process (trade secrets).
- Manufacturing (Gigapress) has been included in the parameter set (and field crossing set that generates IP).
The market has likely underestimated TSLA first mover advantages by a factor of 5.
Based on IP from being the first, not necessarily the smartest.
