Tesla’s Macintosh
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.^195 As 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 de-
signing 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 Coach-
build 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