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Reply to "'Do you want to see the car?': The story of the day that Tesla stunned the world"

Silicon Valley wants to eat Detroit's lunch

Travis Kalanick Uber was just as terrifying to Detroit at Tesla. CEO Travis Kalanick created a company valued at over $60 billion. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui

It’s this second threat that was generating the biggest risks for Ford and its rivals in 2016.

The ride-sharing service Uber, founded in 2009, came on the scene with a brash, sharp-elbowed CEO named Travis Kalanick aiming to eliminate the taxi business in big cities.

By the time the Ford GT race cars were getting their first taste of the Circuit de la Sarthe, Uber was valued at a staggering $65 billion and had just taken a $3.5 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, as the oil-rich nation sought to diversify beyond the natural resource that had transformed it into one of the world’s most influential and richest countries. (Tesla staged an impressive debit of self-driving technology in Pittsburgh in 2016, but in 2017, the company slid into crisis as workplace-culture issues dogged the startup and Kalanick was caught on video arguing with an Uber driver; the CEO later apologized, admitting that he need help overcoming the drawbacks his harsh style.)

Tesla shook up the traditional carmakers. But they could still figure out what Tesla was: an automaker with some high-tech credibility and electric motors, plus a charismatic leader. Uber was much harder to figure out. Pundits began to argue that with Uber, nobody—except for Uber drivers—would ever need to own a car again. And as self-driving cars accelerated their development, the drivers started to drop out of the picture. The future would consist of autonomous vehicles, owned as large fleets, appearing and disappearing as needed, dispatched by software.

Design, horsepower, speed, the automobile as an icon of freedom— that would all be relegated to the misty past, like stagecoaches and Conestoga wagons. All that would matter is that your pod-mobile appeared when summoned and that it moved you from point A to point B.

FM
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