Say what you like about Tesla and the firm's eccentric CEO, Elon Musk, but the company created a successful path to electric vehicle acceptance. Are Elon and Tesla engineering demigods? Or did they see and act upon something that few others could?

One phrase describes Tesla's perception of how to make EVs practical: Thinking in Systems. 

Systems can be simple, extremely complex, and all points in between. They're all around us, yet we don't often recognize them. As a result, we tend to see the parts of a system as the cause of problems rather than viewing the entire system and how it behaves.

A system isn't just any old collection of things. A system is a set of elements - or parts - such as people, cars, molecules, data, or whatever, coherently organized and interconnected to accomplish some function. Thus, a system is syn ...