'The Electric-Fuel-Trade Acid Test': Not Simply Another Plug for EVs
By Scott Doggett September 17, 2009
An article in the current issue of The Economist asks: "After many false starts, battery-powered cars seem here to stay. Are they just an interesting niche product, or will they turn motoring upside down?"
As the smart British weekly is wont to do, it hints at an answer. For that, you will need to read the article -- or at least the last two paragraphs of it. In fairness to the publication, we won't provide them. But the article is just a click away.
That said, here's a brilliantly crafted teaser -- the first four graphs of the article -- which provides a feast for thought:
In 1995 Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen, two researchers at the Harvard Business School, invented a new term: "disruptive technology." This is an innovation that fulfills the requirements of some, but not most, consumers better than the incumbent does. That gives it a toehold, which allows room for improvement and, eventually, dominance. The risk for incumbent firms is that of the proverbial boiling frog. They may not know when to switch from old to new until it is too late.
The example Dr. Bower and Dr. Christensen used was a nerdy one: computer hard-drives. But unbeknown to them a more familiar one was in the making. The first digital cameras were coming on sale. These were more expensive than film cameras and had lower resolution. But they brought two advantages. A user could look at a picture immediately after he had taken it. And he could download it onto his computer and send it to his friends.
Fourteen years on, you would struggle to buy a new camera that uses film. Some of the leading camera-makers, such as Panasonic, are firms that had little interest in photography when Dr. Bower and Dr. Christensen published. And an entire industry, the manufacturing and processing of film, is rapidly disappearing.
Substitute "car" for "camera" and you have a story that should concern thoughtful bosses in the motor and oil industries. Internal-combustion engines have dominated mechanized road transport for a century, but the past year or so has seen the arrival of a dribble of vehicles driven by electric motors. That these are the products of small, new firms, or of established non-carmaking companies, supports the Bower-Christensen thesis. But next year the big boys, encouraged by legislative pressure to produce low-emission vehicles, will leap out of the boiling water and join in.
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