End of the Beginning 338
you rot in hell.” He has now changed his mind, and he calls
himself an environmentalist within reason.^331 Elon is also
an environmentalist within reason. “I’m not too hardcore
about being green,” Elon said. “I think it leads to a very
constrained life. Waste is not good, but we can’t conserve
our way to a solution. If everyone were a super-green
conservationist, it would just delay the inevitable. We have
to find sustainable means of producing and consuming
energy.”^373
The third co-founder who decided to leave Tesla was
Ian Wright; the other were Marc Tarpenning and Martin
Eberhard. Wright felt his vision was different from Tesla’s
and wanted to build an electric vehicle based on a different
technology, so he decided to leave the company after only a
year.^384 With the vision to build the fastest electric vehicle,
he founded the company Wrightspeed. “I want to build an
extreme performance electric sports car, faster than any
production car you can buy for less than one million dollar,”
Wright said. “This would be zero to 60 [100 km/h] in three
seconds.”^207
Unfortunately, Wright couldn’t convince anyone to
invest in his sports car. Instead, he decided to target the
truck industry. He realized that when you operate a de-
livery truck, you replace the truck’s engine several times
throughout its lifetime. When you replace the old gasoline
engine, why can’t you replace it with a clean electric
engine? This is what Wrightspeed set out to do when they
developed a plug and play repower kit for trucks.^26
The designer who first designed the Model S, Henrik