The world's first lithium-ion supercar is here. Zero emissions never looked so hot.
By Joshua Davis
Martin Eberhard holds the brake down with his left foot and presses on the accelerator with his right. The motor revs, the car strains against the brake. I hear … almost nothing. Just a quiet whine like the sound of a jet preparing for takeoff 5 miles away. We’re belted into a shimmering black sports car on a quiet, tree-lined street in San Carlos, California, 23 miles south of San Francisco. It has taken Eberhard three years to get this proto-type ready for mass production, but with the backing of PayPal cofounder Elon Musk, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and ex-eBay chief Jeff Skoll, he has created Silicon Valley’s first real auto company.
“You see any cops?” Eberhard asks, shooting me a mischievous look. The car is vibrating, ready to launch. I’m the first journalist to get a ride.
He releases the brake and my head snaps back. One-one-thousand: I get a floating feeling, like going over the falls in a roller coaster. Two-one-thousand: The world tunnels, the trees blur. Three-one-thousand: We hit 60 miles per hour. Eberhard brakes. We’re at a standstill again – elapsed time, nine seconds. When potential buyers get a look at the vehicle this summer, it will be among the quickest production cars in the world. And, compared to other supercars like the Bugatti Veyron, Ferrari Enzo, and Lamborghini Diablo, it’s a bargain. More intriguing: It has no combustion engine.
The trick? The Tesla Roadster is powered by 6,831 rechargeable lithium-ion batteries – the same cells that run a laptop computer. Range: 250 miles. Fuel efficiency: 1 to 2 cents per mile. Top speed: more than 130 mph. The first cars will be built at a factory in England and are slated to hit the market next summer. And Tesla Motors, Eberhard’s company, is already gearing up for a four-door battery-powered sedan.
In an age when a car’s electronics are worth more than its steel, it seems only natural that the tech sector would have its own car company. The question is, can Eberhard turn the digital era into horsepower, torque, and rpm?
Eberhard has never designed a car and has no experience building one. He created the Rocket eBook, a handheld digital book reader that came to market in the late ’90s. But he insists his eBook background is relevant to starting a car company. The device used a rechargeable battery, and Eberhard – an electrical engineer – devoted himself to maximizing run time and minimizing weight. In 2000, his venture, NuvoMedia, was bought by TV Guide’s parent company, which quickly abandoned the product.
But Eberhard was flush with cash and decided to buy himself a new sports car. He wanted something that was fast but still got good mileage. He quickly learned that high performance and fuel efficiency are mutually exclusive, at least when it comes to internal combustion engines. So he started researching alternative technologies and soon realized it was actually possible for an electric car to combine zip and efficiency. The problem: Nobody was making one. The EV1, General Motors’ electric car, had failed, in part because it was expensive and poorly marketed. Most crippling, though, was the underperformance of the original lead-acid batteries and even the second-gen nickel metal hydride cells. Consumers wanted a vehicle that had a range greater than the EV1’s (at best) 130 miles. The common wisdom was that batteries just weren’t there yet.
But what did Detroit know about batteries? Eberhard had squeezed 20 hours of run time out of the little power pack on his eBook. Battery efficiency was an obsession among computer engineers, who were extracting more power from ever-smaller cells with each generation of laptops. GM seemed oblivious to the lessons emerging from the electronics industry. Eberhard began to think that if anybody was going to build a viable electric car, it would be a Silicon Valley engineer. Then, after reading biographies of John DeLorean and Preston Tucker, and reminding himself that launching a car company was a crazy idea, he did just that.
The central concept of Tesla Motors, founded in July 2003, is that there is no need to reinvent the battery, particularly for a product with a small initial market. Eberhard simply adopted the lithium-ion technology used in laptops and harnessed the momentum of the computer industry. Let Dell, HP, and the rest of the sprawling PC business, with their billions of R&D dollars, do the hard work of extending battery life and driving down prices. He’d piggyback on their innovations.
Meanwhile, automakers had been dis-mantling some of the biggest barriers to entering the business. To lower production costs, the Big Three had outsourced much of their parts manufacturing over the past 25 years. An upstart could buy just about everything it needed to mass-produce a car from independent suppliers. A fledgling electric car company had other advantages, too: Tighter emissions standards have raised the cost of developing gas-powered cars, and buyers of low-emission vehicles are lured by big tax breaks.
In the spring of 2004, Eberhard embarked on a series of meetings with venture capital firms along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. He argued that a combustion engine is an antiquated technology and that electric vehicles are dramatically more energy-efficient than their gas-guzzling counter-parts. “If you took the energy in a gallon of gas and used it to spin a turbine, you’d get enough electricity to drive an electric car 110 miles,” he says in a characteristically enthusiastic rush, trying to squeeze in too many words between breaths.
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.
