A lot of companies started in 02002 based on spreadsheets of available data went bankrupt due to the available data being wrong, or due to things not included in the available data at all. A quick check of Wikipedia turns up:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MStar (patent infringement, the remains bought by MediaTek)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Flash_Brewing_Company (succumbed to competition from local craft breweries, lender foreclosed, the remains bought by private equity)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primaris_Airlines (bankrupt in 02008, unclear why)

And those are cherry-picked from companies that got big enough to be "notable" by Wikipedia's guidelines. Far more companies never reach that level.

The conservative estimate is that any time someone tries to deploy a new technology, it will fail. Most innovations (new technologies or companies) do.

Take a look at the HN front page from 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-09-28 There we see Uber's self-driving truck initiative Otto (an acquisition), deep learning startup Skymind, a new static Linux distro called Stali, and a bunch of things that weren't innovations. All three of those things failed; Stali hasn't been updated since 02019. LuaTeX, Coinbase, Linux, Wikipedia, and dyeing with indigo are other innovations that feature on that page, but they were already very old.

It doesn't change the physics though. I think the author under discussion actually gets this right in some chapters with regard to the superior efficiency of EVs, though not sure if that was a later revision or not.