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How Elon Musk’s Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil
How Elon Musk’s Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil
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INSANE MODE : How Elon Musk’s Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil

Hamish McKenzie
LIKE NEW, PAPERBACK
Hamish McKenzie
LIKE NEW, PAPERBACK

RM25.00

The Astounding Story Of The Most Revolutionary Car Company Since Ford, Revealing How, Under Elon Musk’s Leadership Bringing To An End The Era of Gasoline-Powered Transportation

ISBN 9780571327669
Book Condition LIKE NEW
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher FABER & FABER
Publication Date 27/11/2018
Pages 304
Weight 0.45 kg
Dimension 23.5 × 15.5 × 2.5 cm
Availability: Out of stock

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★★A USA Today New and Noteworthy Title★★
★★ A THRILLING ACCOUNT OF ONE OF THE 21ST CENTURY’S GREATEST BUSINESS STORIES ★★
 
From a journalist and former writer for Tesla comes the astounding story of the most revolutionary car company since Ford, revealing how, under Elon Musk’s ‘insane mode’ leadership, it is bringing an end to the era of gasoline powered transportation.
 
Hamish McKenzie tells how a Silicon Valley start-up’s wild dream came true. Tesla is a car company that stood up against not only the might of the government-backed Detroit car manufacturers but also the massive power of Big Oil and its benefactors, the infamous Koch brothers. He breaks down how Musk and Tesla have kickstarted the race to make the electric car more widely available — and the automakers who are now chasing him, including car start-ups in China and big automakers in the States and Europe.
 
The award-winning Tesla Model 3, a premium mass-market electric car that went on sale in 2018, has reconfigured the popular perception of Tesla and continues to transform the public’s relationship with motor vehicles—much like Ford’s Model T did nearly a century ago. At the same time, company CEO Elon Musk courts controversy and spars with critics through his Twitter account, just as Tesla’s ever-increasing debt teeters on junk bond status….


As McKenzie’s rigorously reported account shows, Tesla has triggered frenzied competition from newcomers and traditional automakers alike, but it retains an edge because of its expansive infrastructure and the stupendous battery factory it built in the Nevada desert. The popularity of electric cars is growing around the world, especially in China, and McKenzie interviews little-known titans who have the money and the market access to power a global electric car revolution quickly and decisively.
 
Insane Mode started off as a feature on the dual-motor Tesla Model S, which gave the car Ferrari-like acceleration, but it’s also the perfect description of the operating cycle of a company that has sworn it won’t rest until every car on the road is electric. Here is a story about the very best kind of American ingenuity and its history-making potential. Buckle up!
 
But Tesla’s wild ride attracts more competition: luxury carmakers Mercedes and Porsche are looking to bring new electric cars to the market that will broaden the push toward zero-emission mobility. Silicon Valley startup Lucid, backed with $1 billion in Saudi money, is also betting on a vehicle market that looks dramatically different in the future.
 
It is a measure of the difficulty of entry into the American car industry that not a single mass-production company has got underway successfully in the United States since Gaston Chevrolet, Henry Ford and Horace Dodge started what would become General Motors, Ford Motors and Chrysler in the 1920s. It is a further measure that nobody until Elon Musk came along has ever been able to start a successful electric car company.
 
The trials Musk and his brainchild Tesla have gone through may not be over, in fact. Despite having delivered the first quarterly profit in two years in the third quarter of 2018, Musk, on Jan. 2 said the company missed its targets, delivering 90,700 vehicles during the 4th quarter and disappointing Wall Street despite its efforts to ramp up production. The stock promptly fell by 10 percent.
 
The travails Musk himself went through in 2018 are enough to merit the title of Hamish McKenzie’s new book, Insane Mode, published in November 2018 by Dutton. As widely reported, Musk got himself sued for defamation by a Thai diver trying to rescue a trapped football team, spurred an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for an incoherent video interview in which he either did or didn’t smoke marijuana, broke into tears during another interview, and was eventually forced to take on new independent directors among a long list of other travails, many self-inflicted.

Nonetheless, according to McKenzie, Musk is “more important to society than [Apple founder Steve] Jobs ever was. While Jobs did the world a great service by putting powerful Internet-­connected computers in our pockets, Musk was operating on a different plane of purpose. In attempting to transform transportation and radically improve space travel instead of developing another photo-­sharing app or the next Flappy Bird, Musk set an example for a new generation of entrepreneurs.”
 
Insane Mode is a story of ingenuity and revolution – of how a new world of transportation could change people’s lives globally. This is a book worth reading to learn not just Musk’s story but that of the electric car industry and, beyond, the contest to save the planet from rising temperatures, the most important story of all. It is unsettling that the electric car industry and its most notable protagonist, Elon Musk, are moving so fast that this book, published just two months ago already needs updating.
 
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Review From The Washington Post :
 
Journalist Hamish McKenzie spent a year working for Tesla, but he makes clear at the outset of his book, “Insane Mode: How Elon Musk’s Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil,” that this is no insider’s story. “I will leave that work to the gossip blogs,” he writes. Instead, he seeks to spotlight the company’s strategy in the context of the auto industry’s identity crisis. He interviews auto experts and electric-car CEOs to illuminate how Tesla paved the way for imitators seeking a foothold in the clean-energy game.
 
McKenzie introduces us to Musk, the mercurial entrepreneur who was bullied in South Africa and later won acclaim as a co-founder of PayPal; that success plumped him with enough capital to launch both Tesla and SpaceX, his aerospace manufacturing and transportation company. In 2018 Musk’s unpredictable nature was center stage: In August he shocked investors by claiming on Twitter that he had financing to take Tesla private, an assertion that Musk later said was a joke but that sparked a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation resulting in his departure as board chairman.
 
In “Insane Mode,” we’re treated to the wildly quotable Musk professing his oft-reported mottos, such as: “Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.”
 
Musk, McKenzie argues, is driven not by profits but by his ambition to upend the auto infrastructure across the world. But it’s no easy task to enter the industry. In a pithy few pages, McKenzie outlines the roadblocks ahead for anyone brazen enough to try: If a newcomer can actually fund engineers, lawyers and designers, and efficiently manufacture a product on a massive assembly line, then that newbie “can expect skepticism, hesitation, and in some cases active disparagement” in the quest “to reach more customers. Get ready to do a lot of explaining.”
 
Certainly Musk has succeeded where others have not. In October Tesla pulled in a profit for the first time in two years. By contrast, Faraday Future, based in Los Angeles and funded by a Chinese billionaire, so far has little to show for its impressive ambitions. Telsa, however, hasn’t been immune to missteps. It has repeatedly missed production targets, leaving consumers in limbo waiting for their vehicles to roll off the line.
 
The company even had to get rid of some color options for its Model 3 sedan to streamline production. In China, an oversight opened the door for competitors to cater to the country’s car enthusiasts. The company initially failed to take into account wealthy Chinese consumers’ distinct tastes. “In particular,” McKenzie writes, “the back seats in the first Model S delivered to China were bench-like and uncomfortable, which was a problem in China, where wealthy citizens often prefer to be driven by chauffeurs.”
 
McKenzie sometimes veers into Tesla cheerleading by stressing the company’s hits over its misses. But the reader also benefits from his exhaustive research, which delivers a fairly nuanced view of how big automakers are trying to keep up with Tesla’s innovations. McKenzie portrays the technological advantages Telsa has over larger companies with its cutting-edge software for auto-driving. General Motors, Ford and others, meanwhile, are known for their sturdy designs.
 
McKenzie writes with breeziness and avoids talking down to readers or loading on too much insider detail. He apparently didn’t interview Musk; the quotes in the book come from company releases, news conferences and media reports. If McKenzie had been able to infuse his tale with original Musk comments, the book would have further stood apart from other works on Tesla’s impact.
 
Still, McKenzie puts us there at a product launch or an interview with a Chinese CEO, even if his metaphors at times come across as head-scratching. Looking over Faraday Future’s first car design, he writes, “As far as SUVs go, this thing is beautiful, like a machine-gun bullet pregnant with twins.”
 
McKenzie clearly sides with Tesla in its battles against conservative billionaires like the Koch brothers, whose oil industry stakes don’t make them friends of the electric-car industry. McKenzie disparages the Kochs’ legacy. “Blocking the passage of a carbon tax supported by environmentalists and oil companies is one such legacy,” he writes. “Creating confusion about clean-energy subsidies and slowing the transition to electric mobility could be another.”
 
McKenzie has delivered a narrative that both fascinates and frustrates: Musk’s passion for a clean-energy future is contagious, but at the same time it’s painful to see the struggle of the electric-car industry to widen its market and win over more consumers. “Insane Mode” will leave you wondering how different our roads would look if we embraced a technology that almost seems inevitable, batteries included.
 
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About The Author :
 
Hamish McKenzie is a writer from New Zealand who lives in San Francisco. He has worked in communications for Tesla and Kik and was previously a journalist whose primary interests were technology and social issues. He is the cofounder of Substack, a subscription publishing start‑up.

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