A Senior Director of Engineering at work never specifically said that she would cause me bodily harm if I did not write a blog entry about my bunny slippers. So I wrote, “They are size 7-½ fluffy pinks with big ears and little, white puffy tails, and I really like them.” She said that […]

They call me “the range guy” at Tesla Motors, which is fitting since it’s my job to characterize and improve the driving range of the Tesla Roadster. This means I get to:

Conduct official range testing according to EPA/CARB procedures,
Work with our development teams to extract the most miles out of the car,
…and best of all…
Spend […]

You may not be aware, but for the past six months Tesla Motors has been very busy in Washington, D.C. As with our consumer marketing efforts, we’ve been trying to get the word out to key influencers in the nation’s capital that there is a company in California that’s applying good-old-American ingenuity to address the […]

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: […]

If you asked people to rate whether they thought their car dealership was a good or bad place to visit, the response would be overwhelmingly bad. In the typical dealership you will find:

Little or no comfortable place to sit, unless you’re ready to sign a sales contract.
Aggressive salespeople who want you either to buy […]

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 […]

The Tesla Motors Team is on the road to the Midwest and East Coast for our 2007 Spring Tour. While we will not have an official Tesla Tour T-Shirt (as good as that sounds, it has probably been done before by some folks that don’t look much like us), we can offer something a bit […]

Richard Feynman is an icon for many employees at Tesla Motors. In 1959 the Nobel-Prize winning physicist delivered an inspiring lecture, Plenty of Room at the Bottom, that encouraged research into what would come to be known as nanotechnology.
The nano world plays a key role for many EV elements. It is what makes today’s state-of-the-art […]

It doesn’t matter where we were going, on which freeway on-ramp we were merging, or even how fast the car was actually traveling. All that matters is that I was driving, I had a journalist riding shotgun, and I was just passing the imaginary apex of a decreasing radius turn with speed to spare. A […]

To ensure that the Tesla Roadster is as safe as possible in extreme conditions, we have just finished putting one of our Engineering Prototypes through an extensive test schedule at the Continental Proving Ground in Arvidsjaur, Sweden. The proving ground is in a beautiful location on and around a frozen lake about 60 miles from […]