You Can’t Sell a Car That Looks Like Crap. CONTENTS

Looks Like Crap

A few years after General Motors crushed the last electric
car, an engineer, who had worked with the EV1, made a
statement. “Today, with the Panasonic batteries, carpool
lanes, free parking at meters, the infrastructure, the subsi-
dies – if we could start over again today with all that, we’d
change the world.”^229 Others who noticed an increased
interest in electric cars were the Toyota RAV4 EV drivers.
Because they got so many questions from people who were
interested in how it is to own an electric car, they began to
bring with them FAQ fliers.
In the beginning of July 2004, Tesla Motors was just
an empty shell. “When we started, we had nothing,” JB
Straubel said. “We didn’t have a screwdriver. We had an
office.”^209 The office and machine shop were in San Carlos,
California. Neither Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning, nor
Elon Musk were an automotive engineer. So to learn how
to build a car, they did what Elon believed in: read books
and learn by doing. Ian Wright, who was an amateur race
car builder and driver, and JB Straubel, who had some
experience from building electric cars, could teach the
others what they knew.^267
The team might have had little experience, but what
Tesla had was the possibility to recruit the right stuff.
Designing an electric vehicle in Silicon Valley, not in