You Can’t Sell a Car That Looks Like Crap 177
said. “I was not proposing performance that sucked. We
thought that we might just break 4 seconds [0-60 mph, 0-
100 km/h] with Tesla’s additional weight, with our worst
case estimates coming in around 4.8 seconds. This is still
extremely quick for a sports car, and would have been a
great car.”^199
To increase the performance, the Roadster needed ei-
ther an improved motor and electronics or a two-speed
transmission. Tesla didn’t have the competence to rebuild
the technology from AC Propulsion, so to get this improved
performance, the Roadster needed a two-speed transmis-
sion. While the Elise used a transmission from Toyota, Tesla
couldn’t find an existing transmission because an electric
car is different from one powered by gasoline.^199
Tesla hired a company to design this new transmission,
but it didn’t work, so they changed to another company.
The Roadster had been delayed by now, so this decision was
rushed, and they chose this company because an engineer
at Tesla in England had a contact there. It turned out that
nor this transmission worked, so Tesla contacted a third
company. Although they could build the transmission, it
would be expensive. “Wow, so the huge development cost
with a nominal timeline of like November 2008 and a high
unit cost,” Elon said. “That’s pretty shitty.”^199
Elon and Straubel had now become tired of the two-
speed transmission and began discussing the original idea.
“Hey, look, why don’t we look to going back to the single-
speed approach and upgrading the motor power, and the
power electronics current capability?” Elon asked. “We’d