The history of the automotive industry is paved in taking luxury technologies and democratizing them to empower the masses to move faster, safer and more efficiently. Henry Ford’s Model T, assembly line and modern factory wage plan essentially created the 20th Century American city, the middle class, and a car culture that’s transformed and traversed the globe. For approximately a century – although cars have gotten safer, faster and more fuel-efficient – the guts of the industry and that culture hasn’t changed much. There hasn’t been a truly successful American auto startup since Chrysler in 1925.
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12: The Road to Disruption
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But that reality is finally changing. With Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors, electric cars have come into vogue and have the potential – at the just-released Model 3’s tidy $30,000 price point – to usurp the internal combustion engine and change the way cars are built, driven and maintained. How will the Big 3 manufacturers in Detroit, and automakers across the globe, react?
Additionally, there is a race stretching from Silicon Valley to Michigan to create the first mass-market autonomous car. With a billion-dollar self-driving car project spearheaded by Ford, in response to in-progress design and testing from Google, Apple and Uber, the question is no longer “if” but “when.” Will self-driving cars have the same sweeping impact on jobs, urban planning and culture as the automobile itself? Let’s travel down that road together in this episode of Trailblazers.
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“I think it's a characteristic of all innovators; to recognize talent in others and then get those others to buy into your own personal vision.”
Matt Anderson, Curator of Transportation, Henry Ford Museum
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What you’ll hear in this episode
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- The first cars cost nearly 7x the average annual salary
- Possibly the most wide-reaching industry disruption in US history
- Half the automobiles driven in the world were once the same car
- The common-sense invention of the assembly line
- The 90-minute car
- A factory that doubled worker’s wages overnight and changed the world
- How Henry Ford created the American middle class
- How a car only turned a $2 profit
- Ironically, how wheel brakes allowed cars to zoom faster
- An industry trend toward smaller, safer, and overseas manufacturing
- Who finally made electric cars sexy?
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- This month, the first reasonably-priced electric vehicle is finally here.
- Elon Musk’s biggest gamble (other than, you know, privatized space travel)
- Are legacy car companies doomed?
- 100 million lines of code. On wheels.
- Why we haven’t had a successful car startup in the US since 1925
- The autonomous car takeover
- Ford’s billion-dollar self-driving car project
- The far-reaching impact self-driving cars will have on cities and jobs
- How close are we to living in this brave new driverless world?
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Guest list
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Hans-Werner Kaas
Is a senior partner at McKinsey’s Automotive Practice in Detroit office. He’s been with McKinsey for more than 26 years serving automakers, their suppliers and technologists in the field.
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Bryan Salesky
Is the CEO of Argo AI. He is the former director for hardware development with Google’s self-driving car division and project manager of at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.
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Oliver Cameron
Is the CEO of Voyage, building self-driving taxis. He’s the former VP of Engineering at Udacity.
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Matt Anderson
Is the curator of transportation at The Henry Ford.
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Ashlee Vance
Is the author of NYT best seller Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. He’s also a writer for Businessweek and host of Hello World.
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A Word with Walter
I had the opportunity to interview Elon Musk at a Vanity Fair Aspen Institute Summit a couple of years ago, and he was absolutely obsessed with electric cars and all forms of disruption, including space travel. A year or so later while in Detroit for the auto show, I was on stage with Bill Ford – the great-grandson of the Henry Ford who built the Ford Motor Company – and he likewise was deeply intent on creating disruption in his car company (in fact, he changed CEOs only a few weeks later). He showed off Chariot, the ridesharing shuttle service, and he was very interested in both getting into self-driving vehicles and electric cars.
So one of the cool things about disrupters like Elon Musk is that they not only disrupt an industry, but they sometimes cause the older players to disrupt themselves. We’re going to see whether it's Silicon Valley with its software prowess, or Detroit and people like Bill Ford, who are able to capture this next wave of automobile making in America.
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