place where you come to browse, try out, and purchase the different options available. This onboarding experience hasn’t really changed since the 1950s. It’s a big, glass box full of cars where you can talk to salespeople. If we look at the broader context that informs the car onboarding experience, not much has changed here either. There have only been incremental shifts in the product they’re selling, the environment in which they sell them, the audience they sell to, the packaging, and the price they charge. In fact, Tesla is the first car company that’s tried to shift this formula. Compare this to an industry that’s changed it’s onboarding over time – fast food. Back in the 1920s, the most popular restaurant chain in the US was Horn & Hardart, and American cities were very different than they are today. The population density of a place like the Lower East Side of Manhattan was four times what it is today. The onboarding challenge was to efficiently and effectively serve a huge number of customers in a relatively small space. So Horn & Hardart created the Automat, an automated restaurant. You’d walk in, go to a wall with an array of windows containing different foods, choose the one you want, put a dime in, take the food out and go back to your seat. All of this happened without any staff involvement. The restaurant was amazingly effective. The biggest one in New York was able to serve 10,000 people per day. When contexts change, so does onboarding
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