Title: Chief Executive Officer, Aptera Motors
Well, I would have to say the ever-increasing ubiquity of powerful computers. Besides being connected and allowing people to exchange messages, data and to use the Internet, it's done something else. It's increased the technical/scientific/engineering capability of single engineers by orders of magnitudes. Properly used, and I stress "properly," computers are not just abstract boxes on desktops for email and surfing the net, they are powerful "force multipliers."
For example, at our company we're heavily leveraged in CFD, computational fluid dynamics. Every single part of our vehicle that touches the air has been through countless revisions to lower the drag. Fifteen years ago, even ten years ago, our only alternative would have been to use a wind tunnel, an expensive and lengthy affair. It's unlikely we could have afforded anything other than a small 1/4 scale tunnel, and at $10,000 per day, which is a typical rate, we wouldn't have got very far.
But, NASA and Boeing and other big giants have these tools, too. However, what's remarkable now is that small companies like Aptera can afford the same tools that these giants have. A small company, armed with these tools, but without a bureaucracy, can turn around key engineering decisions in days or hours, not months or years.
The proliferation of these tools is a great equalizer with the bigger companies. What took 100 engineers to do in the 1940's can be done by several engineers, or maybe even one lone engineer, depending on the task.
