You Can’t Sell a Car That Looks Like Crap 183
or a battery pack that weighs half as much as the battery
packs weighs today.^234
In the end, the Roadster got a range of 244 miles [393
km] per charge. But a customer claimed he had driven 347
miles [558 km] before his Roadster needed to charge.^360
The Roadster became more and more expensive, so
Tesla needed more investors. In 2005, Elon invested more
of his own money, and he convinced the Google founders,
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, to invest some of their money.^196
The film crew behind the documentaryRevenge of the
electric carwanted to film a Roadster. Straubel delivered
it to the movie set. The prototype car had a gaping hole
where the front grill should have been. To hide the flaw,
the film crew took a quick trip down to Home Depot for
some landscaping mesh and they went to Office Depot for
some metal binder clips. Now they could fabricate a grill so
no one could see that the Roadster wasn’t finished. Straubel
was impressed and the film crew told him he could keep the
design.^212 “I thought my portrayal in the film was OK,” Elon
said. “There were moments that made me want to cringe,
that were terrible, but over all I’m not unhappy to be in the
movie.”^432
In January 2007, the now 205 employee strong company
wanted to test if the Roadster could survive harsh winter
conditions. They traveled to Arvidsjaur in the northern
parts of Sweden, 68 miles [110 km] south of the Arctic
Circle. During the winter, the Sun is above the horizon