Just recently, Tesla rolled out a subtle update to its official website. After welcoming the site’s visitors with its electric vehicle lineup for years, tesla.com now primarily showcases Tesla Energy products, represented by a header image featuring a home with solar panels and Powerwall batteries. The update was simple, but the company’s message was clear: Tesla Energy’s time to shine in the spotlight as arrived. The time to push battery storage and solar solutions into the mainstream market is now.
Tesla is known more as an electric vehicle manufacturer, and for good reason. The company owes its existence to the original Tesla Roadster, a small sports car that was built on a Lotus platform that broke mainstream conventions about what an electric car could be like. But the company’s mission as per CEO Elon Musk has always been clear: Tesla exists to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainability. And it just so happens that electric vehicles cannot get the job done alone.
During a previous interview with Teslarati, Robert Bollinger, the founder of Bollinger Motors, a maker of off-road, rough-and-tough EV trucks and pickups, stated that any new automaker today has to be focused on electric cars. And he’s absolutely right. It may not be universally acknowledged outright, but the automotive industry knows that electric vehicles are the way to go in order to survive the future. Full stop.
It might be a strange idea today, but there was once a time when electric vehicles were not taken seriously by the motoring industry at all. With the Model S, Model 3, Model X, and now the Model Y, Tesla has essentially pulled the automotive sector towards electric transportation kicking and screaming. After years of empty EV promises, unnecessarily complex electric concept cars that will never get mass produced, and sweet-talking statements about commitments to a zero-emissions future, legacy auto simply cannot stand by and maintain its old stance. It simply cannot afford to if it wants to survive.
The same has not happened yet to the utility sector. Renewables are on the rise, and climate action awareness is gaining ground. But overall, the idea of utilities being powered by renewables and giant batteries is still widely considered as niche ideas for now. The fossil fuel industry is still very prominent in the energy sector, and thus, the battle for sustainability on this front is only just beginning — and it will be very, very difficult. If the automotive sector was pulled into EVs kicking and screaming, the energy sector, which is dominated by the fossil fuel industry, will likely fight even harder.
This is something that supporters of Tesla and those that follow the company have to keep in mind. Tesla has struggled with misinformation for over a decade thanks to short-sellers and skeptics who simply don’t believe in electric cars or the company’s specific approach to EVs. It would thus be wise to brace for the upcoming challenges that will be brought about by Tesla quite literally taking on the fossil fuel industry, and in an arena that it has dominated for a very long time.
Fortunately, Tesla is now a mature company with an equally mature technology. Its battery tech is also second to none, as evidenced by the upcoming announcements for its highly-speculated million-mile battery. These, together with the support of an electric car business that is now the largest in the automotive industry by market cap, may very well give Tesla Energy enough power to disrupt, and eventually transition, the utility sector towards sustainability.
