More important, Eberhard says, the electric cars of the past -- slow, cramped, spartan -- looked like they were designed by people who thought you shouldn't be driving to begin with. Eberhard calls them "punishment cars." What he wanted to build, he told his potential investors, was a classic sports car. He wanted to have his ecofriendly ride and race it, too. Initially, the Sand Hill VCs weren't interested. Eberhard got his first bite from Elon Musk, cofounder of PayPal, who -- over the course of two years -- put in nearly $30 million of his own money and also corralled some of his wealthy entrepreneur friends to chip in. By May 2006, Tesla Motors had raised $60 million. Now Eberhard had to get the car into production.
Just before Christmas 2004, 30 employees and board members from Tesla came to Eberhard's Woodside, California, house to decide what the car would look like. He had commissioned four top automotive designers to draw sketches, which he taped to his living room wall. He gave everyone three red stickers and three green and told them to flag what they liked and didn't like. By the time the eggnog was gone, the green dots had coalesced around a drawing by Barney Hatt of Lotus Design in England. This is how a Silicon Valley startup does car design.
Lotus had manufactured cars for GM, in addition to its own lightweight aluminum sports car, the Elise. So Eberhard contracted the company to assemble his new vehicle, codenamed Dark Star (after a classic low-budget sci-fi movie). The electric motor would be built in Taiwan, and engineering and R&D would be conducted in a San Carlos warehouse. The space had offices in the front, and Eberhard began to fill the cubicles with dotcom veterans. Mike Harrigan, the man in charge of setting up a nationwide network of auto maintenance centers, had previously founded two communications equipment makers. Gretchen Joyce, vice president in charge of sales, had spent the previous four years at eBay. There was no doubt that this was going to be a different kind of car company.
What Eberhard didn't know about car manufacturing -- which was just about everything -- he got by hiring engineers and executives away from Lotus. Eventually, he lured so many Lotus employees that the British company insisted he sign a no-poaching agreement or it wouldn't build the car.
For three years, Tesla Motors ran in stealth mode. Because electric cars had failed so visibly in the late '90s, the company knew it faced a tough marketing challenge, and Eberhard didn't want to show the world something half-baked. If Tesla was to succeed, it would need to present a fully realized, radically different approach. Luckily, there was little threat of car spies ruining the surprise. "Silicon Valley is a great place to run a secret car company," Eberhard says. "Nobody expected something to sprout up in Northern California, so no one came looking."
Eberhard owes his radically different approach to Nikola Tesla, the iconic Serbian engineer who built the first AC induction motor in the 1880s. Eberhard's supercharged update of that motor is powered by a copper and steel rotor that is spun by a magnetic field. There are no moving parts besides the rotor. Step on the accelerator and the motor delivers instantaneously. An onboard computer provides traction control, keeping the car from burning rubber. The result: 0 to 60 in about four seconds. And, since the motor is not limited by the complexity of pistons moving up and down, it can spin much faster. Porsche's top-of-the-line model -- the $440,000 Carrera GT -- maxes out at 8,400 rpm; the Tesla Roadster has a ceiling of 13,500, enabling it to go 70 mph in first gear. (It has two gears, plus reverse.)
The Roadster's sporty styling allowed Eberhard to maximize the car's range and still win a drag race. With its two-person capacity and aerodynamic contours, the lightweight machine can go 250 miles on a single charge. (When connected to a special 220-volt, 70-amp outlet, recharging takes about three and a half hours.) Plus, the sports car class lets Eberhard price it on the high end -- in the range of a Porsche 911 Carrera S, roughly $80,000.
Of course, an expensive two-seater isn't going to have much effect on an industry that sells 17 million automobiles in the US each year. Sure, every VC will have to get one, and George Clooney will probably be seen piloting one down Sunset Boulevard. But selling a few thousand cars won't help Eberhard build a dominant 21st-century car company.
That's why he's already preparing a sedan, codenamed White Star, which could hit streets as early as 2008. Of course, the sedan won't be as lightweight or aerodynamic as the Roadster, so its range is likely to drop significantly. Eberhard's response: maybe with today's tech. But battery power is improving steadily, and several companies say they may soon double battery life. By the time the sedan comes out, he says, batteries will be ready to deliver: "We're going to ride that technology curve all the way home."
A cop drives by, and Eberhard smiles benignly as the Roadster edges forward silently from a stop sign. It's an eerie, disconcerting feeling. There's no engine hum -- nothing to make you think that this car should be sold with a neck brace. Most high-performance cars telegraph their power. That's part of the allure of a seriously fast car -- you can hear it coming. The Roadster seems like a sneak attack. As with everything about this car, Eberhard has a fast answer. "Some people are going to miss the sound of a roaring engine," he says, "just like people used to miss the sound of horse hooves clippity-clopping down the street."
Eberhard suggests it would be easy enough to pump MP3s of prerecorded engine roar into the car's Blaupunkt stereo. And for those with even older tastes, the sound of horse hooves could be substituted. But damn if that horse isn't going to sound strange at 13,500 rpm.
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And they said Nikola Tesla was pshyco.
Just think Dw, if we're around long enough you might see these cars on the Nascar tracks.
