NEWSI OPINIONI GOSSIPI STUFFThat’s a bold statement because a lot of
people feel like EVs are soulless. Prior to
Tesla, you owned a McLaren F1, which was
the supercar of the day. It was. Now the
Model 3 performance can beat it. I think
the McLaren F1 was an incredible design,
and for a gasoline car, it’s amazing. It’s a
piece of art, for sure. But when you go to
electric, it’s just a fundamentally superior
technology. You’ve got physics on your
side. You’ve got Isaac Newton as your
copilot—he’s helpful. The McLaren F1 is
50 percent slower 0–60 than the Perfor-
mance Model S [P100D]. And it’s a four-
door sedan that can seat up to seven. You
could probably put seven people and full
luggage and still beat a McLaren F1.What’s next? We’ve got to scale up our
production to make millions of cars per
year. I think in general, from a societal-
benefits standpoint, we need to improve
the cost of an electric powertrain to
make the car more affordable. And we
need autonomy. The next two massive
disruptions for cars are electrification
and autonomy, and they are happening at
the same time, very basically. The future
will be all electric, all autonomous. I don’t
mean some electric, some autonomous,
I mean all electric, all autonomous.
Whether you like it or not, this is what’s
going to happen. Ed LohWhy continue to upgrade and update the
Model S with new Easter eggs and video
games? The overall goal is, how do you
make a car as fun as possible? We only
have a couple of engineers on this. It’s not
like a massive investment. But if you’re
waiting for somebody while they’re shop-
ping or you’re charging up, you can play a
video game. The overarching goal is, what
can we do to make you fall in love with
this car? The biggest thing about Tesla
and the cars that we make is that this is
not designed by a soulless corporation.
There’s not some finance spreadsheet or
something like that with some market
analysis—there’s none of that. Obviously,
we need to bring in more money than we
spend, but at the end of the day we want
to make a car that we love, that hits us in
the heart, that makes you feel. And how
many of these cars—they have no soul.
They make all these cars that have no soul
or no heart, and they wonder why nobody
feels anything for them. Why should they?They Say...
A
lthough anniversary issues tend
to dwell on the past, we wanted
to also look into the future. Our
interview subject is the man history might
deem most responsible for changing
the course of the traditional internal
combustion vehicle. The following are
excerpts from a video interview, edited
for length and clarity, of Tesla Motors
co-founder and CEO Elon Musk, at Tesla’s
design studio in Hawthorne, California.
For the full-length interview, head to
MotorTrend.com.When you look at the first Model S concept,
what does it bring back?
Heartache. We gave our heart to this car,
for sure. Everything just all in.Is there any particular feature your team
sweated over? Door handles, for sure. The
nose, every curve, every crease, angle, we
went over every tiny piece all the time.
And it’s a hard thing to make a sedan look
good. To make a sports car look good is
relatively easy. It’s sort of like a runway
model. The proportions are set up to look
good. But sedan proportions are not set
up to look good.The original Model S came out in 2012, for
the 2013 model year. Since then, how come
nobody has surpassed Tesla in terms of
range and performance?
Well, I don’t know. It’s surprising to
us. Once we started delivering them to
customers and they were approved by
the regulators and met all of the safety
requirements, I really expected that
within maybe three years or something,
we’d have something that was better than
the original Model S. But I guess the car
industry is just fairly slow to evolve. It
didn’t take electric vehicles really seri-
ously until 2015, maybe 2014. A lot of the
senior execs at the other car companies
still didn’t believe it, and we’re like, “Well
you could just drive it and see if it’s real.”Tesla head of design Franz
von Holzhausen (left),
Elon Musk, and the original
Model S concept can be
seen in an exclusive video
on MotorTrend.com.Elon Musk
THE FUTURE WILL BE ALL ELECTRIC, ALL AUTONOMOUS.
I DON’T MEAN SOME ELECTRIC, SOME AUTONOMOUS.
I MEAN ALL ELECTRIC, ALL AUTONOMOUS.ÓCo-founder and CEO, Tesla Motors
PHOTOGRAPHS WILLIAM WALKER