Erik Nordeus - The Engineer

A group of EV1 supporters traveled across the country to find out what had happened to their cars. They heard a rumor that the cars had been transported to the General Motors proving ground in Arizona. With a rented helicopter, they flew over the area and found the now crushed cars. “The EV1 had to be forcibly taken from people, and then the cars were sent to some car graveyard where they were squashed, while the customers held a candle-light vigil,” Elon said. “Now, when was the last time you heard of someone holding a candle-light vigil for a product, let alone a General Motors product? How blind do you have to be to not realize that that is something you should be pursuing, not destroying? It’s astounding incompetence. Mind-blowing incompetence. How foolish. Where would GM be today if it had done the EV2 and EV3?” 197

While General Motors manufactured the EV1, Toyota manufactured 1480 electric RAV4 EV. 500 of them were still rolling on the roads as late as 2012. One famous RAV4 EV driver was the actor Tom Hanks, famous from the movie Forrest Gump . He began to search for an electric vehicle in 2003, and since the EV1 didn’t exist anymore, he had to buy the RAV4 EV. “When the car companies collectively, and, to some, diabolically, decided to take these cars back, the electric vehicles disappeared,” Hanks said. “But not mine. I have the pink slip. I own that car, and it is still driven every day, albeit by one of my crack staff of employees. My electric car recently crossed 50 000 miles [80 000 km] on the odometer with its original battery but without so much as a splash of gasoline.” 191

In addition to the RAV4 EV, Hanks bought an eBox, which is an electric Toyota Scion xB. The car actually looks like a box and may not win a design price, but Hanks liked it. “There are three electric cars sitting on the Moon, and now another one in my garage,” Hanks said. “The eBox makes even more sense in Los Angeles than in the Taurus-Littrow Valley of the Moon. I can drive all weekend, hauling dogs and helping my friends move, and the only reason I’ll need to stop at a gas station is for beef jerky and lottery tickets.” 192Ironically, it was engineers from General Motors who came up with the best design for the electric Lunar Rover that drove around on the Moon. 348

AC Propulsion was responsible for converting the Toyota Scion xB to the electric eBox. Alan “Al” Cocconi, thus the AC in the company name, founded the company in 1992. Cocconi had earlier worked with the now crushed EV1. He designed the first prototype in his garage. But as General Motors didn’t believe in the EV1, he decided to make a better car on his own.

Cocconi bought a Piontek kit car, converted it to electric power, and renamed it to tzero. “We designed it to show that ultimate performance is available for electric vehicle technology,” Cocconi said. The plan was that the tzero would be the first in a series of the next generation environmental friendly vehicles. The name tzero originates from the engineering term t0, which indicates the first measurement of time in a sequence of several measurements, where t1 is the next measurement, and so on.

It was the tzero that convinced Hanks to buy an eBox. “I drove their tzero electric sports car a few years ago, so when they put the same technology in a four-door I wanted one for myself,” he said. 219The yellow tzero wouldn’t win a design competition, it had no safety systems, and it was expensive. But it was fast. When the car competed with a famous sports car, the Dodge Viper, the tzero had a better acceleration. 33

Elon has always liked cars. He has owned, among others, a 2007 Porsche 911 Turbo, a Hamann BMW, an Audi Q7, the 1967 Series 1 E-type “bad girlfriend” Jaguar, and of course the McLaren F1. 4He used the Porsche as a family car. Two of his children could sit in the tiny back seat. 190But electricity didn’t power any of these cars.

Cars are the type of transportation that consumes the most oil. Out of the 20 million barrels of oil consumed each day in the US, cars are using 25 percent, light trucks are using 18 percent, heavy trucks are using 16 percent, and airplanes are using 6 percent. When there’s no more oil to fill the gasoline vehicles, then we have no other choice than to choose another type of fuel. Elon’s prophecy is that peak oil will happen in 2020, so he believes a majority of all new cars manufactured in year 2030 will be pure electric. 20 years after that, a majority of all cars on the roads will be pure electric. 360“There may be something cooler than a car in 20 years, but the most likely outcome is that we’ll still have cars and they’ll be predominantly electric,” Elon said. 316

Alternatives such as ethanol or fuel-cells are not good enough compared with the electric alternative. Ethanol may work in countries where there’s plenty of room to grow the plants that will be turned into ethanol, but not in other countries. “Domestic ethanol as the primary solution will definitely not work for the world’s most populous countries, such as Japan, China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia,” Elon said. “Those countries are either breaking even on domestic food production or are net importers. If you argue that ethanol is to be grown elsewhere and shipped, where are the vast tracts of unused arable land?” 248

Electricity is the best alternative because electricity is like cash – it can be generated in many ways. You can power an electric vehicle by generating electricity from coal, wind, solar, water, oil, natural gas, geothermal, or nuclear power. 359

Electric vehicles are also energy efficient to use. Let’s say you produce electricity in a coal power plant. If you calculate the CO 2per mile if an electric vehicle is charged with electricity from the coal power plant, the electric vehicle will release less CO 2per mile compared with a hybrid car. This is because even without clean electricity production, it’s very efficient to produce power at a power plant. “What’s important to appreciate is that even if the power is 100 percent coal-generated, the CO 2per mile is still better than a gasoline engine,” Elon said. “The electric motor is incredibly good at turning energy into motion. Mostly what you’re doing with a gasoline engine in a car is generating heat.” 57

In 2003, Elon went to a lunch in Los Angeles organized by Harold Rosen. 199With them was also JB Straubel, who first heard of Elon when he attended a Stanford University speech where Elon talked about SpaceX. 214

At age 14, Jeffrey Brian Straubel, known to all as JB, discovered a discarded electric golf cart. He decided to rebuild it. To find the parts needed, he convinced his mother to drive as far as 50 miles [80 km] in search for batteries, tires, and electric motors. “He was passionate about it,” his mother said. “He wrote to the manufacturers for information. He worked on it every day, all day long, all evening long, until he got it to run. JB was born to be an engineer. He was always passionate about anything that had wheels and required engineering.” To motivate himself, he watch the movie October Sky . “I watch it every year or so,” he said. “It’s inspirational. I always come out of it wanting to work harder.” 213,215

Straubel has always enjoyed the sound of silence. He can drive for hours without listening to music. This might be the reason to why he became fascinated by machines powered by electricity. “Electric vehicles don’t make much noise,” Straubel said. “When they do, something is not right.” Among other projects, he worked with unmanned electric airplanes, he converted a Porsche 944 to electric drive, and he constructed an electric bicycle nicknamed the Red Bike . He was also a fan of the EV1 and you can see him, or his unknown twin, driving it in the documentary Who killed the electric car? “I was talking to anyone and everyone to promote the idea that electric vehicles had turned a corner,” Straubel said. “I told them that with new battery technology, they could go much, much farther than anyone thought was possible.” 213,215