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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