The auto industry's disruptor-in-chief has done it again. With the public reveal of his BMW 3 Series-fighting Tesla Model 3 in April, Elon Musk did something the auto industry has failed to do in more than half a century: get people truly excited about a new car. So excited, in fact, that about 400,000 of them have reportedly plunked down a $1,000 deposit for a vehicle that's said to be still more than a year away from the showroom.

The last time the auto industry saw anything like this, the Beatles were on top of the Billboard charts, Lyndon Johnson was in the White House, and the tragedy of Vietnam had yet to sear America's psyche. The car that did it was, of course, Ford's original Mustang.

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Primed by a superbly executed publicity campaign that included ads in 2,600 papers, the simultaneous placement of cover stories in Time and Newsweek magazines, the first ever roadblock TV ad buy on CBS, NBC, and ABC, and star billing at the 1964 New York World's Fair, 22,000 frenzied consumers placed orders for the Mustang the day it went on sale. One guy who beat out 14 others for a car slept in it overnight at the dealership until his check cleared.

Well, the Model 3 just blew the Mustang away.

Of course, cynics are quick to point out that when the Mustang launched, Ford was a proper, grown-up automaker, while Tesla … Yes, Tesla's financials, like the self-landing rockets of Musk's other venture, SpaceX, seem to defy the laws of gravity. In the immediate aftermath of the Model 3's reveal, Tesla's stock zoomed upward almost $40 a share, hitting $265.42 on April 6, valuing the company north of $33 billion.

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Meanwhile, Ford shares have bumbled along between $11 and $16 over the past year. On a good day, then, the company that put the world on wheels is worth maybe twice as much as the pesky startup from Silicon Valley. You can imagine the sour mood in the C-suite in Dearborn, probably matched only by that of the Wall Street analysts who keep sputtering that Tesla's valuation makes absolutely no sense.

However, whether Musk is another Preston Tucker or the next Henry Ford, he's achieved something remarkable. It's not that he's created an auto company from scratch. It's that he's captured the lightning in a bottle for which automotive marketers around the world would sell their souls. He's made tech-savvy 21st-century consumers fall in love with the idea of owning an invention that defined the 20th century. A car.

The last time we saw anything like this, the Beatles topped the Billboard charts.

Model 3 mania has laid bare the dichotomy at the core of the modern automobile industry: This is a business often run by engineers and accountants who rely on system and process to create and manufacture a product that sells … on emotion. A consumer's decision to purchase a car is always rationalized but rarely rational. The looming specter of autonomous vehicles notwithstanding, the car business is not a transportation business. It's a fashion business.

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At the same time the Tesla phenomenon underscores a deeper truth about the auto industry: Consumers relate to an automotive brand that clearly and unambiguously stands for something. Tesla doesn't do marketing. It doesn't spend vast sums on advertising. It doesn't sponsor a race team, back a high-profile charity, or put on rock concerts. It just makes game-changing cars that have set new standards for electric vehicle performance and style, usability and desirability.

And along the way Tesla has become something else: a genuine premium automotive brand. Tesla doesn't need faux-luxury pomposity or pseudo-sporty psychobabble or any one of a dozen other marketing tricks; the cars do the talking. Like the cars that made the reputations of, oh, Rolls-Royce and Bentley, Porsche and Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW.

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