Skip to main content

Good Disruption

I am very far from a car enthusiast and have no desire for novelty when it comes to car. Its always the safe, boring and reliable Japanese auto for me without the technology bells and whistles. We went car shopping recently and its been a long time. At a traditional dealer not much had changed. It was still some rookie sales guy trying to pitch what little he knew about the car we were interested in, running back and forth between us and his boss in the back room to work up the numbers. We did not like any iteration of said numbers and left. It was a weeknight and the place felt dreary - the number of sales people vastly outnumbered the number of car shoppers - the parking lot was full to the brim with cars that they were hoping to sell. 

I am not a Tesla fan, have never test driven any of their cars. A friend of ours has a vivid blue Tesla with the gullwings. I recall feeling particularly awkward when they picked me up in that car outside my hotel one time I was in their town for work. It felt highly dramatic and quite excessive. I was glad to be inside and not making a spectacle on a busy street - that is simply not my kind of car. The drive to their home was very pleasant - I had no reason to dislike the car at all. That was my one and only encounter with Tesla this far.

So that evening after our disappointment with the car dealership, we went to the Tesla showroom down the street. The experience was remarkably not like the car-shopping as we know it. It felt like visiting the Apple store to pick up a new phone. The customer experience alone felt so refreshing, that I would consider buying the car despite my desire for safe, old, boring and such. The numbers were significantly more competitive. The side and by side experience got me thinking about what good disruption looks like for customers. It makes me read stories about Tesla's woes in very different light. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more