Erik Nordeus - The Engineer

In the end, the Roadster got a range of 244 miles [393 km] per charge. But a customer claimed he had driven 347 miles [558 km] before his Roadster needed to charge. 360

The Roadster became more and more expensive, so Tesla needed more investors. In 2005, Elon invested more of his own money, and he convinced the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, to invest some of their money. 196

The film crew behind the documentary Revenge of the electric car wanted to film a Roadster. Straubel delivered it to the movie set. The prototype car had a gaping hole where the front grill should have been. To hide the flaw, the film crew took a quick trip down to Home Depot for some landscaping mesh and they went to Office Depot for some metal binder clips. Now they could fabricate a grill so no one could see that the Roadster wasn’t finished. Straubel was impressed and the film crew told him he could keep the design. 212“I thought my portrayal in the film was OK,” Elon said. “There were moments that made me want to cringe, that were terrible, but over all I’m not unhappy to be in the movie.” 432

In January 2007, the now 205 employee strong company wanted to test if the Roadster could survive harsh winter conditions. They traveled to Arvidsjaur in the northern parts of Sweden, 68 miles [110 km] south of the Arctic Circle. During the winter, the Sun is above the horizon for only four hours each day. 246The area is favored by car manufacturers from around the world for cold weather testing. Not only cars must be able to survive a cold climate, military personnel from across the globe travel to this region to learn how to endure extreme winter conditions. “It was minus 55 degrees Celsius [minus 67 degrees Fahrenheit],” the British survival expert, Ray Mears, said when he was in the area. “At that temperature you cannot make a single mistake – if you make a mistake you’re going to end up with frostbite. So you have to be very, very careful.” 23The ironic part of testing an electric vehicle in Arvidsjaur is that the area has become warmer, most likely due to global warming, so several car manufacturers have moved on to colder proving grounds in China.

A harsh winter climate is a problem if you are driving an electric vehicle. When the temperate drops to minus ten degrees Celsius [minus fourteen degrees Fahrenheit], the range of a Tesla will decrease by ten percent. This is primarily due cabin heating that requires more energy the colder it is. “The battery actually loses very little energy when cold,” Elon said. “Keeping batteries cold is actually the best way to preserve them. It only loses energy when keeping the pack warm for the convenience of the driver – so you don’t have to wait long to drive.” 224

Other tests the Roadster had to endure included the Belgian Pavé test, where the car was driven over a harsh cobblestone road at high speed. Almost any car will break after 4000 [6400 km] to 5000 miles. “We finished that test and actually did quite well on it, had a very small number of failures. We had one bracket break on a front suspension component that we redesigned,” Eberhard said. 200During these types of tests, and because of the constant vibrations, you can only drive for 30 minutes before you need a break. One poor Tesla driver thought the Roadster would fly apart and his teeth would shake loose. 453

There’s also a much longer durability test – about 50 000 miles [80 000 km] long. While driving on that track, one misery the car has to endure is a saltwater bath. “We did have some water getting into one of our cables,” Eberhard said. “So it required us to change the design of the cable and make sure it was simply more waterproof.” 200

The German company Siemens manufactured the Roadster’s airbags. But Siemens became nervous because they didn’t know if Tesla knew how they would use their airbags. The only way to calm them down was to let Siemens do the crash tests themselves. Four hand built Roadster were transported to Germany and systematically destroyed. 209

In July 2006, the first Roadster prototype was finally revealed. Celebrities like the movie star and politician Arnold Schwarzenegger attended the uncovering show at the Santa Monica Airport. Later the same year, Tesla showed the Roadster at the Los Angeles Auto Show where Schwarzenegger held a speech. “Every industry has to participate in the fight against global warming, and these clean, efficient alternative fuel vehicles are leading this environmental revolution,” he said. “I test drove this vehicle [the Roadster], and it is hot. I’m buying one for Maria [his wife], for her birthday.” 336,355

You can compare the Roadster with Apple’s first computer, the Apple I. Elon’s vision was that the next car from Tesla would be comparable to Apple’s Macintosh. 195As with the DarkStar, the WhiteStar was also a codename, and the real name of the mid-price, mid-volume car, was Model S.

Perhaps the most important lesson learned from designing the Roadster was that it’s more efficient to not redesign someone else’s car. “The biggest single error we made with the Roadster was not starting from scratch,” Elon said. “It would have cost us less and resulted in a better car if we had started with a clean sheet. So it was like you wanted to build a house, couldn’t find the right house, so you try to fix an existing house and end up changing everything except for one wall in the basement.” 190,235

Tesla hired Henrik Fisker to design Model S from a clean sheet. The Dane, who had designed the latest Aston Martin, had now a styling company called Fisker Coachbuild that conceived unique bodies for existing chassis.

When Fisker showed his design suggestions, Tesla thought they were horrible. And they thought they knew why. Fisker would soon work with a competing car at Fisker Automotive. Tesla suspected that the only reason why Fisker had accepted the job was that he wanted to get an insight in how the engineers at Tesla worked. A sort of industrial espionage. 327“The initial proposals he came with were pretty good, and then as we got into it they started getting worse and worse,” Elon said. “I was very puzzled as to why he was producing such awful designs for us. The design Fisker did for us was nicknamed ‘the white whale’ it was so bad. It turns out what he actually decided to do was to take our specifications for the Model S. He took that basic plans, shopped it, got it funded, didn’t tell us.” 190,374

They sued each other, and the court ruled in favor of Fisker. “There is no reason I would design a car purposefully bad,” Fisker said. “That’s just ridiculous.” It’s common that the best car designers work with different auto manufacturers, and Tesla knew Fisker had founded his own car company. Fisker thought Elon needed to blame others for his own difficulties. “On a trivial level, it reminded me of the O.J. trial,” Elon replied to the court’s decision. 374

To avoid a similar experience, Tesla created their own design studio in a small, white tent carved out of a corner in the back of the SpaceX factory. Now they needed a designer.

Despite the German-sounding name, Franz von Holzhausen was born in 1968 in Simsbury, Connecticut. After graduating from the Art Center College of Design, he worked for various car companies. He spent eight years at Volkswagen and Audi where he learned the German way to combine design with quality. Then he brought his knowledge to General Motors where he worked with the cars Pontiac Solstice and Saturn Sky. After leaving General Motors, the next challenge was working with Mazda’s Kabura concept. “So what I learned from all these positions was how to develop a brand,” von Holzhausen said. “I learned discipline from the Germans while in America – it is about the free spirit, the message is what a brand can do. Sometimes, when I’m driving on the freeway, I see people in cars that I’ve designed or helped design. I look closely, because I want to see what kinds of people are driving those cars.” 239,241