Hybrid Car - More Fun with Less Gas

Given the recent management changes, some reassurances are in order regarding Tesla Motors’ future plans. The near term message is simple and unequivocal - we are going to deliver a great sports car next year that customers will love driving. To give you some sense of our level of confidence, a few weeks ago we allowed [...]
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Okay everybody, I need a little help from you. What is the biggest EV charging circuit that could be installed in your house? This sounds like an easy question, but it turns out not to be. The answer depends on a lot of factors, all spelled out in the National Electrical Code (NEC). Now those of you [...]
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It’s been a few days now since news of the new Tesla Motors CEO hit the streets. There’s been a lot of coverage of this change – some good, some bad; some sympathetic, some not. A minute before midnight this Saturday, San Jose Mercury News writer Matt Nauman posted a blog with the earliest leak of the CEO transition, apparently quoting from a letter I wrote to our customers. The first response to Nauman’s blog was this Saturday Morning Doozy:

“One reason Eberhard was probably fired was because he started fibbing to his company, in addition to the public. This was the yokel who originally claimed 250 miles of range “no matter what,” a preposterous claim that clearly marked him as a prevaricator. He also fudged on the price of all those 6871 battery cells his car uses. I came to think of Eberhard as an unreliable version of PT Barnum.”

Ouch! I have to assume that the commenter has never attempted to do anything that was really difficult – something that has significant risk and where not everything goes perfectly. I just hope that his inflammatory speculation is not a harbinger of how my legacy at Tesla Motors will be written.

Those of you who follow Tesla Motors know a bit about me and about the other personalities involved. You know that I have maintained an air of openness about Tesla Motors – publishing more details about our bold vision and progress than any car company has ever published before. I have shown off our technology even as I have shared our setbacks with you. I have shared with you my thinking and the math behind it, and many of you have scrutinized my reasoning. Whenever my thinking has proven to be faulty, I have readily admitted it and given credit to whomever corrected me.

To be fair, every negative posting about the Tesla Motors CEO transition has been followed by someone defending me, and I do appreciate this support very much.

I am often asked by reporters, what at Tesla Motors is our most difficult problem. They are usually fishing for specific technological problem – battery capacity or safety, building custom motors, troubles with transmissions, manufacturing paintable carbon fiber body panels, etc. These problems, and a dozen more, are indeed tough. But my answer has always been this: Every one of these problems is solvable. So is lining up all our suppliers for timely factory delivery. So is creating and stocking our Tesla Stores and their service and parts departments. So is the maze of state, federal, and international regulations that apply to us. So is raising funds to finance all of the above. Layer that with the need to start development of our second car program (with its new factory) before we begin shipping our first car. I’m good at solving such hard problems. What makes Tesla Motors particularly difficult is the sheer number of these tricky problems that we must simultaneously solve. We’re not just juggling a lot of balls. We’re juggling knives and chainsaws and burning things. We have to catch every one of them, and we have to catch them by their handles.

I initiated a CEO search many months ago as Tesla Motors has grown in size and complexity beyond twice the size and at least five times the complexity of any organization I have run before. I was becoming concerned that my own inexperience with large organizations and operations would soon become a limitation for the company’s success, and I set the machinery of change in motion in advance of any problems.

Michael Marks is an early investor, a Signature 100 customer, and someone I have known and admired for many years. He has given me management advice and recruitment leads over the course of Tesla’s history, and I suggested to him some months back that he might make a great CEO here. Flush with his well-earned success at Flextronics, Michael certainly does not need a job here or anyplace else, and he indicated early on that he was not interested in a long-term CEO role.

It came as a bit of a surprise to me that Michael was willing to join Tesla Motors as interim CEO just as we are getting the Tesla Roadster into production. His skill and experience with operations, manufacturing, and supply chain management are particularly useful to us right now, as we transition from a purely R&D company to one with significant manufacturing and operations components. His unexpected availability was too good for the Tesla Motors Board to pass by, so they decided to move rather quickly.

This means that I will spend less time with Tesla Store plans, performance reviews, purchase order approvals, board meeting minutes, and the like - and more time with engineering and manufacturing to get Tesla Roadsters on the road, and also more time with you, our customers. Honestly, this sounds like a lot more fun to me.

Michael and I will work out the exact details of my new role in the coming weeks. I plan to focus on our cars rather than on which kind of latte machine we should have in our stores.

I trust that this change will be good for Tesla Motors, but I am not going to kid you about how I feel: Tesla Motors and specifically the Tesla Roadster have been my dream – no, my obsession – for five years now. What Co-Founder Marc Tarpenning and I set out to do five years ago was generally considered to be impossible: impossible to make a decent electric car, impossible to start a new car company, impossible for an upstart car company to build a car that meets Department of Transportation safety standards, impossible to find anyone willing to invest in such a venture.

But somehow we did it. Not absolutely perfectly; We have had our share of setbacks, feature creep, cost overruns, schedule slips. But every time we were knocked over, we got back up again and kept running. I am damned proud of what we have built here at Tesla Motors, and though with hindsight I might have done better, I am not ashamed of any of our setbacks. Our overriding philosophy has always been to deliver quality cars as soon as we can, rather than to meet a schedule that might compromise the cars.

And we have accomplished one more big thing: We got the world to re-think electric cars. Far from dead, far from punishment cars, electric cars are now widely seen as the exciting future of the automobile. The driving public is demanding that Big Auto rethink its strategy beyond gasoline, rethink its commitment to hydrogen, and rethink its decades-old truism that driving green requires driving a compromise. Even Bob Lutz over at GM has admitted that early news of the Tesla Roadster played a big part in the creation of the Chevy Volt.

We have come a long way, and here we are on the eve of the Tesla Roadster’s start of production. Yes, I am sad to pass the Tesla baton, even if it is the best thing for Tesla Motors.

Martin Eberhard
Founder & President of Technology
Tesla Motors

p.s. I’ve had a few requests for the slides that go with my presentation to the Motor Press Guild last week. Here’s a link to the video of my presentation for now.

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Last Thursday I participated in a panel at the Future in Review (FiRE) conference in San Diego, Calif. Very cool – I got to meet one of my heroes: iRobot founder Helen Greiner. (My own Master’s thesis at the University of Illinois was in robotics.) Helen took a ride in the Tesla Roadster and came away with a big smile.

But fun as it was, I decided to cut out early and hustle across town to testify at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) hearings on the future of the Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate. Members of the public (including execs from all the big car companies as well as individuals with relevant opinions) were each given strictly-enforced 3-minute slots for testimony.

The whole hearing was “Back to the Future,” with both CARB and all the large car companies once again urging continued research into hydrogen fuel cells, but with the dates moved further out and the number of required fuel cell cars on the road reduced by an order of magnitude. Hey, forget fuel cells, how about researching a Mister Fusion instead?

The most amusing testimony for me was from Ballard Power Systems. Unlike the car companies, the Ballard spokesman urged CARB to increase the number of fuel cell cars required, transparently increasing the demand for their own fuel cells…

Also entertaining was when both a CARB board member and the BMW spokesman recommended changing the definition of a large-volume car manufacturer so that BMW would not be forced into a fuel cell program as their California sales surpass 60,000 cars. They were followed by the Honda spokesman who specifically requested that BMW be required to join the fuel cell brotherhood.

I did not originally plan to be at the hearing because of the FiRE conference. I wrote my testimony at the last minute on the back of a copy of Chris Paine’s prepared testimony, with overflow on the back of Alec Brook’s testimony. It’s always risky to use sarcasm in public speaking, but I could not resist. Here is what I said in my 3 minutes:

Good afternoon, Members of the Board.

I am Martin Eberhard, cofounder and CEO of Tesla Motors, based here in California.

Tesla Motors will begin shipping highly-desirable, DOT-compliant electrical cars with well over 200 miles range later this year – perhaps you saw one of our prototypes outside. We have already pre-sold more than 400 cars; 2008 production will easily exceed 1,000 cars, exceeding the worldwide fleet of fuel cell cars.

Additionally, we will deliver Tesla-built battery systems for the newly revived TH!INK City Car this year, with a standing order for many thousand batteries per year.

The Air Resources Board continues to show a bias toward hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and against the less expensive and more efficient battery electric vehicles. This bias is clearly seen in the ARB Independent Expert Panel Report. Tesla Motors believes this bias is not justified by science of the evidence of actual vehicles and infrastructure.

However, we are actually delighted by the way this bias finds implementation in the ZEV mandate. For the results of this mandate is that all of our potential EV competitors – all the big car companies – remain mired in non-productive, deeply-expensive fuel cell programs, keeping them out of the EV marketplace, and indeed out of the serious ZEV marketplace entirely.

Every year spent on fuel cell programs by GM, Ford, Honda, and the rest is another year we at Tesla Motors can build our technological and market lead in the obvious winning technology: battery electric vehicles. We therefore sarcastically and enthusiastically encourage you to maintain the hydrogen bias and keep our competitors in the quagmire.

Meanwhile, we are on schedule to place 15,000 battery electric Tesla vehicles on the road by the end of 2010.

Sarcasm aside, wouldn’t it be nice for our environment if we had a few competitors?

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Well, the rumors have been flying and the press releases are coming, so it’s about time for me to talk about Tesla Energy Group. Tesla Energy Group is a group within Tesla Motors, Inc. created to allow us to design and sell Energy Storage Systems (ESSes) to other companies. (By ESSes, I mean large lithium ion battery packs made from small, commodity, cells.)

A bit of history

When we started out thinking about the Tesla Roadster ESS, many cell manufacturers were understandably nervous about the hazards of a battery pack containing a large number of their cells. The burden was on Tesla Motors to demonstrate that we understood and designed for safety, even in the event of a spontaneous cell failure. And the truth is, in the beginning we did not fully understand all the issues.

But we learned. We did quite a few “Fourth of July” tests to understand how lithium ion cells (of every stripe) failed, and what happens to adjacent cells in a tightly-packed system. We began to understand the problem more than a year before the famous Sony/Dell fiasco, and we set a corporate requirement that no such cell failure would lead to thermal propagation in our ESS. (See the white paper: The Tesla Roadster Battery System for more information.)

We then had to figure out how to make our system mass-producible – as commenters on this blog have noted, even at Tesla Roadster production volumes, manual cell connection would be unreasonable. And we had to make it light. (I had to eat some crow on this issue recently…)

We went through something like seven generations of design before we had what we consider to be a good, safe, reliable design. We validated this design with outside testing laboratories, and we demonstrated safety to the various cell manufacturers to convince them that they were not at undue risk of liability were they to sell us cells. We soon will demonstrate overall ESS safety in a series of United Nations-mandated tests so that we can ship production ESSes (and cars) over the ocean. We also recently performed the 50 mph rear-end crash test pursuant to FMVSS-305 compliance, which also is primarily concerned with battery safety.

The word leaks out

Along the way, word got out that Tesla Motors ESS technology is pretty darned good. Unsolicited, cell manufacturers referred companies to us. And other vehicle manufacturers came asking us about our technology.

Jan-Olaf Willums, President of TH!NK (and one-time investor in REC), approached me late last year, and invited me to tour the then-idle TH!NK production line in Oslo. After getting to know and like each other, we began discussing the possibility of a Tesla Motors-designed ESS for the TH!NK car.

Think, as some of you may recall, was once called Pivco, selling economical plastic EVs in Norway. They were acquired by Ford and renamed TH!NK during Jacques Nasser’s tenure at Ford, as part of their efforts to meet the requirements of California’s Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate. Ford pumped well over $100 million into TH!NK, completely redesigning the car to meet DOT requirements, including especially radical improvements to its crashworthiness.

But the redesigned TH!NK never hit the road – Ford ditched TH!NK the moment the mandate was gutted in 2003, selling it off to some wacky Swiss investor named Kamal Siddiqis, who subsequently bankrupted the company. (Ford originally planned to crush the American TH!NKs, but after considerable public outcry, they packed ‘em up and shipped ‘em back to Europe.)

In the mean time, a group of forward-thinking investors created a Norwegian solar panel company called Renewable Energy Corporation (REC). This company went public in Norway with a spectacular IPO in 2006 (Ticker = REC), returning a handsome profit for the visionary investors who made it happen.

Subsequently, this group of investors acquired the remains of TH!NK from bankruptcy in Norway. This was a brilliant move, because the majority of the engineering work was already bought and paid for. The biggest opportunity to improve on the Ford-designed TH!NK was to upgrade its batteries – hence Jan-Olaf’s interest in Tesla Motors.

And TH!NK is certainly not the only company that has approached us with serious interest in our ESS technology.

What to do?

I am a startup guy. I have been successful in past ventures by keeping the company focused on Job One, to the exclusion of any side business opportunities that come along. Here’s what made me change my mind for this case:

1. Working to provide actual ESSes to other companies will raise our own game – the Tesla Motors ESS will be better for having thought through a wider range of issues.
2. The Tesla Motors ramp to high-volume cell purchasing will be steeper, driving down the price of our own ESSes more quickly. (also true for other ESS components.)
3. We can drive up the volume of cells used in cars more quickly, so that we can begin to influence the direction of their evolution. (e.g. each cell would lose a few grams if the can was aluminum instead of steel. This is no big deal for a laptop, but it’s a few kilograms for a car!)
4. Tesla Motors will get an additional revenue stream, allowing us maybe to grow a little faster.
5. EVs will develop more quickly around the world. On the one hand, I definitely want Tesla Motors to become THE electric car company of the future. On the other hand, our mission is advanced if we enable other EVs or PHEVs.

More than any other subsystem on the Tesla Roadster, the ESS has required fundamental invention and clever solutions to tricky problems. Nobody makes anything like the Tesla Motors ESS; it’s impossible to hire people with “prior experience,” so the ESS team is dominated by bright, young engineers with a lot of creativity and enthusiasm. Together, they have filed more patents than any other group at the company. Impossible is a word that has no meaning for them.

Bernard Tse (the former founder and CEO of Wyse Technology) is an old friend and was a Tesla Motors board member since almost the beginning. He has deep experience is in high-volume, low-cost manufacturing, with lots of experience all over Asia. When I mentioned the TH!NK opportunity to the board, he got quite excited by its possibilities. He spent several months researching the idea, persuading me and the rest of the board along the way. He finally decided to step off the board and lead Tesla Energy Group.

We reorganized the company to create Tesla Energy Group late last year, with Bernie at the head. It’s been a big job for him and for the team. His largest challenge has been (and still is) to move our design and processes out of the lab and into production. Wish Bernie the best success – he will need to draw upon all his experience as an entrepreneur, as a manager of a strong engineering team, and as a high-volume, cost-sensitive manufacturer.

Cloaking Off

With today’s announcement of a deal to provide ESSes for TH!NK, I can now admit that Tesla Energy Group exists as an entity within Tesla Motors Inc. This is a big step for Tesla Motors and a good deal for TH!NK. While Tesla Energy Group is talking to other possible ESS customers, we will remain very careful about which deals we consider, and my job is to remind Bernie from time to time that the Tesla Roadster is still Job One.

P.S. Any similarity between Tesla Energy Group (TEG) and our regular blog commenter “TEG” is purely coincidental. And I can’t think of any acronym that adds up to “Anatoly Moskalev.” Sorry Anatoly.

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Yesterday was my first experience testifying before a Senate subcommittee – this one was called the Hearing on Advanced Technology Vehicles: The Road Ahead, before the Senate Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy, Natural Resources, and Infrastructure.

Unfortunately, many of the usual members of this subcommittee were not present, due to Jack Valente’s funeral. In attendance were: Senator Bingaman, the Chairman of the Subcommittee; Senator Thomas, the Ranking Republican member; and Senator Salazar of Colorado.

Four other witnesses and I sat at a table facing a raised semicircle of mostly empty Senators’s desks. Sitting behind the empty Senators’s seats were a dozen or so staffers from the offices of the absent Senators. Right in front of me was a wooden box (that matched the decor of the room) with a remotely controlled video camera that would swing ominously from witness to witness as we were talking. Weird.

Behind the other witnesses and me were some reserved seats for our entourage. (Mine consisted only of our own Diarmuid O’Connell, but other witnesses brought hoity-toity lobbyists.) Behind them was open seating for maybe 50 people in the audience. People savvy in the ways of Washington, D.C., would have recognized all of them, I suspect, but I recognized only a few.

The other witnesses were (from my right to my left – the order we testified):

• Mr. Mark Chernoby, VP, advanced Vehicle Engineering, DaimlerChrysler Corp. (from the Chrysler side of things)
• Mr. David Vieau, CEO, A123 Systems
• Me
• Dr. Walter McManus, Univ. of Michigan, Transportation Research Institute
• Mr. Phillip Baxley, President, Shell Hydrogen

I did not like the format of the proceedings at all – they seemed designed to prevent any actual conversation. Basically, Senators Bingaman and Thomas each gave a prepared 6-minute speech and then allowed each of us witnesses to speak for 6 minutes. (They were not hard-nosed about time, allowing speakers to run over by a few minutes as needed.) Each of the present Senators then questioned individual witnesses, spending 6 minutes per Senator.

All of the witnesses had submitted written testimony a few days in advance. Mine is here. Each of us pared down our oral testimony to the bare essentials in order to make the time limit. (Some did better than others ) It was clear to me that the Senators had indeed read our written testimony in advance of the hearing.

Mr. Chernoby talked exclusively about DaimlerChrysler’s clean diesel work. Clean diesel is great – trucks will be powered by diesel for a long time, and clean diesel is better than dirty diesel. But Mr. Chernoby was lobbying for more diesel cars:

• Converting a Jeep Grand Cherokee from gasoline to diesel will save 418 gallons per year, while changing a Honda Civic from normal engine to a hybrid engine saves only 154 gallons per year. Therefore, we should be pushing diesels more than hybrids. This logic is a bit convoluted to me – we would save a whole lot more gas if we persuade a significant number of people to give up the Grand Cherokee altogether and drive a Civic! (Or one day, a WhiteStar…)
• If we lowered the standard for emissions from diesel engines, then more diesels could be sold as “lean burn” clean diesels under the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Duh. Redefine “clean” so that more diesels can be called “clean.”

Senator Salazar: “But isn’t diesel made from petroleum too?”

Mr. Chernoby: “Well yes…”

Some questions came about biodiesel, too, but not one mention of the incredible deforestation going on right now in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand to plant palm oil plantations for biodiesel. Palm oil is the number one feedstock for biodiesel.

Mr. Vieau spent time talking about A123 batteries and their application in plug-in hybrids. Generally, I agreed with him, but he made an outrageous assertion and a poor explanation of hybrids. He made this same assertion twice, so it was not just a matter of misspeaking. Here is his claim:

A hybrid increases the gas mileage of a car from 25 mpg to 45 mpg by adding a battery. A plug-in hybrid increases the size of the battery, and thereby increases the mileage to 100 mpg.

This is both absurd and misleading. If you go back to 2003, the Toyota Prius was basically the same car as the Toyota Echo. The Echo got 38 mpg (combined), while the Prius got 48 mpg (combined). That’s a 26 percent improvement, not an 80 percent improvement. And the reason a plug-in hybrid get better gas mileage is because 20 or so miles per day is powered by electricity from the grid, not gasoline!

Mr. Vieau also urged subsidies for conversions to plug-in hybrids, and he had a converted Prius outside for staff to see after the hearing. I think these conversions are great in that they raise awareness and push the manufacturers. My concern about large-scale conversions are two-fold:

1. The original manufacturer (e.g. Toyota) would rightfully void the car’s warranty for such a conversion. This is different than installing an aftermarket radio in that you would be changing the engine’s behavior, so the ever-so-important, legally mandated emissions warranty would be void. Is A123 ready to take on this emissions warranty liability?
2. I just witnessed the video of our own car passing the FMVSS-305 50-mph rear crash test. (Gasoline cars must pass FMVSS-302). Plug-in hybrids probably have to pass both.) This is a brutal crash. A giant “truck” slams into the back of the car at 50 mph, crawls all over it, and basically destroys everything in the back of the car. After the crash, the car is not allowed to leak any flammables (even when inverted), and no hazardous electrical shorts are allowed. Has anybody done this test for a Prius (and every other conversion) where a high-power battery pack has been installed in the trunk? I can guarantee that the spare tire well of a Prius (where A123 installs its supplemental battery pack) is going to be squashed by this test. Who takes on the liability for these cars?

During my oral testimony, I argued for two things (once I figured out how to work the microphone )

1. Reinstatement and enhancement of the income tax credit for electric cars. If hybrids (and practically every other alternative technology cars) get a tax break, so should electric cars!
2. Allow electric cars to qualify for the same humungous tax break that 3-ton SUVs do, if they are used for business use. An accountant or a lawyer can drive a Tesla to visit clients just as easily as s/he could drive a Hummer.

In my written testimony, you will see that I also argue for the development of domestic commodity battery cell production, though I did not have time to make this case in my oral arguments.

Dr. McManus proposed “fee-bates” to encourage efficient vehicles – basically charging a fee for low-mileage cars based on how far below the CAFE mpg requirement, and awarding a rebate to high-mileage cars based on how far above this CAFE number. Nice idea, but the Senators seemed skeptical about the viability of passing such a law. A lot of voters drive big ol’ SUVs… Dr. Manus came from the car industry but seemed a bit hostile to (or at least frustrated with) the American car companies. Just my impression.

Mr. Baxter (the man from Shell) had me jumping out of my seat wanting to call him on his nonsense. I never did get to respond, so his astounding assertions went unchallenged. The responses below only occurred in my mind…)

• The single largest impediment to the wide-scale adoption of hydrogen cars is local regulations and obstacles to installing hydrogen filling stations. (What???)
• Shell already makes hydrogen as part of its petroleum refining process. In fact, Shell makes so much hydrogen that it could power the entire fleet of American cars, were they powered by hydrogen. All we need is filling stations. Oh. And cars too. (Really? What a wacky assertion! I checked his written testimony, and this gem is not there. But he made this claim twice during his oral presentation.)
• Hydrogen is a clean fuel, which can be made from wind, solar, and nuclear power. (But how efficiently, Mr. Baxter? Did you know that an electric car like a Tesla would drive more than three times as far as a fuel cell car on the same “clean” electricity?) Mr. Baxter did admit that the hydrogen they make today is by reforming natural gas…
• The government should not pick technologies; it should let the market decide. However, it should increase its subsidies for Hydrogen. (Isn’t that picking a technology? Don’t you know that the only reason any car company is fooling around with fuel cells is the modified California ARB ZEV Mandate – another case of the government picking a technology, and picking poorly? )

What a load of hogwash. I wonder how much of this nonsense sticks, and how much is seen for what it is by the Senators and their staff.

I met with a couple of other Senators and staff afterwards, again reminding them that rumors of the demise of the electric car have been exaggerated.

And then – for continuity’s sake, I flew home just in time to catch Chris Paine’s anniversary showing of Who Killed the Electric Car at De Anza College. I don’t know if I made any difference in DC, but here in California, the future of cars is electric.

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As you may have read in previous blogs, we recently built our first couple of Validation Prototypes (VPs). These cars represent a significant step forward toward production as they implement numerous corrections to issues discovered during safety and durability testing of the Evaluation Prototypes (EPs), are built from hard-tooled components for all body panels, include production headlights, taillights, and interior components (including much more comfortable seats), and many other subtle changes.

Along the way, we made several design decisions that improve the safety and durability of the car, understanding that there would be tradeoffs. The two most significant decisions were:

• We made many design changes to the car, as a result of testing, to make it more durable and safe. As Murphy would have it, most changes added weight, increasing the car’s weight by several hundred pounds.
• We deliberately chose lithium ion cells with a slightly lower capacity than the largest cells available, because theses smaller (and more mature) cells have better long-term durability and higher tolerance for abuse.

We recently performed our first actual driving range tests with a Tesla Roadster that incorporated these design changes (and many others!) on an EPA-compliant dynamometer. Based on the results of these tests, we now anticipate that the range of the Tesla Roadster will still be greater than 200 miles, but will not meet our original target of 250 miles. You may have noticed the change on our homepage and in our specs.

Last week, we sent letters to our Tesla Roadster customers, as they deserve to know about this specification change first. They have asked us many probing questions, and I hope that my answers satisfy them. Many of their questions center on the gain in weight. I have explained many of the tradeoffs we have made – generally trading additional weight for increased safety or durability – the result of our safety and durability tests on the EP cars.

Here’s my response to customer questions about weight, as posted in the Owners Area, a private area of our website for Tesla Roadster owners:

There is no single 100-pound (or even 50-pound) addition. What I get from Engineering is a long spreadsheet of incremental weight. Some examples:
• SAE shake and vibration testing caused us to stiffen up (and add a fair bit of weight to) several parts inside the Energy Storage System (or battery pack), damping out resonant frequencies.
• Durability testing caused us to improve (and add weight to) the mounting system for the modules within the ESS, and to strengthen the brackets that mount the ESS to the chassis.
• Durability testing also caused us to increase the strength of one of the front suspension brackets on each side.
• We broke the top motor mount on two EP cars doing demonstration “hole shots,” necessitating changing from magnesium to aluminum, and increasing the bracket size as well. (Did any of you notice a funny clunk in the car late in the evening at our launch last July?)
• Hard driving convinced us to change the motor end housings from magnesium to aluminum as well - under severe testing, we had trouble with the bearings spinning in their mounts.
• Hard driving in the desert caused us to increase the size of the coolant pump. Several heat sinks (both in the PEM and on the motor) got a bit bigger (and heavier) too.
• We got very conservative when we redesigned the transmission because we knew we had to get it right the first time - no opportunities to strengthen it later.
• Upon strong urging from our new transmission supplier, we also changed to an electro-hydraulic shifting mechanism (instead of a purely-electrical one), because it is far more reliable and durable and because it shifts much more quickly. Needless to say, it is a bit heavier too.
• On our first try, the side intrusion test failed, largely because we lowered the door sill height. The redesigned door beam is, naturally, stronger and heavier.
• NVH (Noise, Vibration, and Harshness) testing caused us to add damping material to solve various noise issues, particularly the sound of the A/C compressor.
• Our original electric door latches were simply unreliable. We changed to a much better latch from a different (American!) vendor that is (as you already guessed) heavier.
• The original stereo did not sound like it belonged in a sportscar of this caliber (okay, it sounded like heck), so we redesigned it to take a 9-liter subwoofer and some decent speakers.
• Because the car got heavier, we had to increase the strength (and therefore weight) of the suspension and brakes.

This and twenty other lesser items add up to a couple hundred pounds. Each is a relatively small item; each is totally justifiable and even necessary. The result is extra mass, the result of long, hard safety and durability testing.

Maybe I was a bit naive expecting to hold the line on mass. Those of us at Tesla Motors who have a long automotive experience say that fixes to problems discovered this stage of the program always adds mass.

The upside of all this is that the Tesla Roadster will be a much more reliable car for having added this mass.

At more than 200 miles, the Tesla Roadster will still have the highest range of any production EV in history by a large margin, and we will continue working hard to deliver even better range in the coming months.

My original premise was that the Tesla Roadster’s range is high enough that you would not have to worry about charging during a typical day, even if you have a long commute, take the car out for dinner and chores, or even take the scenic route home. Once home, you plug it in – just like you would your cell phone – and by the time you’re ready for another day, your Tesla Roadster is fully charged and ready to go. I believe that this premise is still intact with a range above 200 miles.

With the benefit of extensive testing of our EPs, I am confident that we will achieve a final range above 200 miles. Now that we have completed cars and have a deeper understanding of the EPA’s testing methodology, our future range estimates will be based on empirical testing, not simply modeled estimates. We continue to drive engineering improvements to increase range, and explore options that would allow customers to choose between increased range and enhanced performance. There are still some unknowns and variables that will become known as we develop and test our VP cars, so I have chosen to communicate a floor of 200 miles and strive for upward revisions in the future.

We are holding the line on 4-second 0-60 mph acceleration, largely because the extra mass has been offset by improvements in the drivetrain. We won’t know exact numbers until we have real transmissions this summer, but the team remains confident. I drove VP1 home last night, and as I rocketed around the curves of Skyline Boulevard, I could not keep the smile off my face. The Tesla Roadster is still the quickest and most fun car I have ever driven. The way it hugs the corners, the way it pulls out of a corner is simply without compare.

Tesla Motors has come a lot closer to shipping a DOT-compliant and roadworthy performance electric sportscar than anyone has ever before. One thing for sure – the cold, hard reality of actual test results on a fully-equipped car destined for production is a lot tougher than estimates, simulations, projections, and every manner of vaporware about non-production (and even nonexistent!) cars.

Obviously, writing a blog like this is not the most fun part of my job, and I have challenged our team to give me some good driving range news that I can announce later this year. We will see – they are an amazing team.

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
– Richard Feynman.

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We’ve just achieved a significant milestone on our road to Tesla Roadster production. Our first Validation Prototype was assembled at the Hethel facility in the U.K. and was recently airlifted to our San Carlos, Calif., workshop to commence system testing. VP1 at the Hethel, U.K., facility. The car is riding a little high because the battery pack [...]
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I’ve been reading Michael Schnayerson’s book, The Car That Could, about the inside story on the development of General Motor’s EV1. It’s a fascinating read and I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of modern electric vehicle development. I had the good fortune of meeting the author during my first week at Tesla [...]
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Last week Tesla Motors announced the selection of a site in west Albuquerque where we will build a 150,000 square foot assembly facility for our planned four door sports sedan, code-named WhiteStar. Response to the news has been tremendous, and we’ve received numerous requests for more information about the decision. Ron Lloyd, who headed up [...]
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