Electric Sports Cars
You can’t kill an electric car you can’t catch
Tesla Motors is a car company that’s both decades ahead of its time, and a year behind schedule. Soon, it will become clear which is more important to Tesla’s long-term future, and the future of the disruptive ideas the company represents. For those who somehow missed the blizzard of publicity that has swirled around this company for the past 18 months or so, Tesla (www.teslamotors.com) is a Silicon Valley start-up, bankrolled by some of the same people who brought you the Internet boom of the late 1990s. The company’s stated ambition is to develop over the next several years a full array of electric cars. Many influential leaders of Silicon Valley’s “clean tech” green-technology movement see Tesla as an icon of the broader effort to make big money by unshackling the U.S. economy from petroleum.
Tesla’s first model will be a $98,000 electric roadster, developed around the architecture of a Lotus Elise, that uses 6,831 lithium-ion batteries similar to those used in laptop computers, a patented electric-motor system, and a highly sophisticated package of controllers and software to deliver an exotically attractive car that zaps from standstill to 60 miles per hour in under four seconds and can travel up to 245 miles on a single charge. Tesla isn’t planning any traditional advertising, but if it did, one slogan could be: “You can’t kill an electric car you can’t catch.”
Tesla recently told potential customers that it can no longer guarantee delivery of 2008 models. Newcomers to the waiting list might well get 2009s. Tesla’s Big Idea was to start with an electric car that appeals to the id, not the superego. From the start, co-founder Martin Eberhard says he wanted a car that could outrun a Porsche in a 0-60 trial, and would go 250 miles on a charge. The production Roadster will hit the under four-second target for the 0-60 dash, and will get very close to the original goal on range.
Tesla so far has raised $105 million from venture-capital firms and Chairman Elon Musk, the PayPal founder who was a ground floor investor. That’s a lot for a tech startup, but it’s chump change in the auto industry, where car programs with century-old, conventional technology can easily cost $500 million to $1 billion.
How did they pick the name Tesla? Tesla is named for Nikola Tesla, the godfather of alternating current and radio who nonetheless died poor, in part because his weirdness wound up obscuring his genius. In recent years, Tesla has become a patron saint of Silicon Valley.
