You Can’t Sell a Car That Looks Like Crap 179
disagreed. “I was very insistent on things during the design
phase, and it is true those things cost money, but you can’t
sell a $100 000 car that looks like crap,” Elon said. “On some
of these changes I had to be quite forceful because Martin
[Eberhard] didn’t want to spend the money.”196,209
Because of all these changes, the Roadster and the Elise
became two different cars. In hindsight, it would have
been a better idea not to redesign the Elise. “We have the
same airbag system,” Eberhard said. “We have a similar
crash protection system. But it isn’t so much based on the
Elise. There was maybe ten percent common parts to it in
our cars. The windscreen, the airbag system, some of the
surround, some of the rubber seals, that kind of thing. The
chassis of the car is not a Lotus chassis and the body is
clearly different than the Lotus body.”^200
Another part that differed from the Elise was the
engine. Tesla decided to use a modern version of an engine
developed by Nikola Tesla himself. With a diameter of
25 cm, the 250 hp engine would sit on the rear-axis. It
weighed only 60 pounds [27 kg], which is considerable less
compared with a regular gasoline engine.
The batteries needed to power the engine in a Tesla
car are the same batteries as can be found in a laptop:
lithium-ion batteries. These are the best batteries available
for purchase and for installation in a car, and they will
probably be so for a long time. “We looked at some of
the other chemistries of batteries around and they’re either