This morning I attended a good seminar hosted by Screen Interaction with Tesla and Martin Charlier, author of Designing Connected Products who gave some good takeaways when designing for IoT and gave me a new line on the emerging list of Christmas wishes.

Tesla, mainly giving a product presentation which in itself was slightly disappointing. However, what strikes me is that no matter what will happen with Tesla as a brand in the future (I tend to believe in it, and until I can afford one my self at least own a couple of stocks), every industry would need its own Tesla.  What Tesla has given the automotive industry is a sense of urgency that IoT is happening now, threatening to outrun the old world automakers and enforcing them to act as quickly as possible to replace a 150 years old invention and rethink the experience of a car. This is a big shift, as five years ago electrically powered vehicles where inferior in every way, and maybe more important, mostly bought by environmental-nerds with too many university credits dressed in too big cardigans…

Another takeaway from all this is that maybe the automobile industry has been able to adopt as quickly as it has due to a setup where they don’t aim to own the entire value-chain. After all, many brands share the same components and buying from subcontractors just to assemble the parts in the production-line is the established behavior since years back. Would it have been as quick to transform if each carmaker owned every part of the value-chain themselves? Doubtfully.