4 minute read
Technologue Highlight Reel
from 4t8h8ctf
by Thomas Swift
They Say...
Tesla head of design Franz von Holzhausen (left), Elon Musk, and the original Model S concept can be seen in an exclusive video on MotorTrend.com.
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Elon Musk
Co-founder and CEO, Tesla Motors
Although anniversary issues tend to dwell on the past, we wanted to also look into the future. Our interview subject is the man history might deem most responsible for changing the course of the traditional internal combustion vehicle. The following are excerpts from a video interview, edited for length and clarity, of Tesla Motors co-founder and CEO Elon Musk, at Tesla’s design studio in Hawthorne, California. For the full-length interview, head to MotorTrend.com.
When you look at the first Model S concept, what does it bring back?
Heartache. We gave our heart to this car, for sure. Everything just all in.
Is there any particular feature your team
sweated over? Door handles, for sure. The nose, every curve, every crease, angle, we went over every tiny piece all the time. And it’s a hard thing to make a sedan look good. To make a sports car look good is relatively easy. It’s sort of like a runway model. The proportions are set up to look good. But sedan proportions are not set up to look good.
The original Model S came out in 2012, for the 2013 model year. Since then, how come nobody has surpassed Tesla in terms of range and performance?
Well, I don’t know. It’s surprising to us. Once we started delivering them to customers and they were approved by the regulators and met all of the safety requirements, I really expected that within maybe three years or something, we’d have something that was better than the original Model S. But I guess the car industry is just fairly slow to evolve. It didn’t take electric vehicles really seriously until 2015, maybe 2014. A lot of the senior execs at the other car companies still didn’t believe it, and we’re like, “Well you could just drive it and see if it’s real.”
Why continue to upgrade and update the Model S with new Easter eggs and video
games? The overall goal is, how do you make a car as fun as possible? We only have a couple of engineers on this. It’s not like a massive investment. But if you’re waiting for somebody while they’re shopping or you’re charging up, you can play a video game. The overarching goal is, what can we do to make you fall in love with this car? The biggest thing about Tesla and the cars that we make is that this is not designed by a soulless corporation. There’s not some finance spreadsheet or something like that with some market analysis—there’s none of that. Obviously, we need to bring in more money than we spend, but at the end of the day we want to make a car that we love, that hits us in the heart, that makes you feel. And how many of these cars—they have no soul. They make all these cars that have no soul or no heart, and they wonder why nobody feels anything for them. Why should they?
That’s a bold statement because a lot of people feel like EVs are soulless. Prior to Tesla, you owned a McLaren F1, which was
the supercar of the day. It was. Now the Model 3 performance can beat it. I think the McLaren F1 was an incredible design, and for a gasoline car, it’s amazing. It’s a piece of art, for sure. But when you go to electric, it’s just a fundamentally superior technology. You’ve got physics on your side. You’ve got Isaac Newton as your copilot—he’s helpful. The McLaren F1 is 50 percent slower 0–60 than the Performance Model S [P100D]. And it’s a fourdoor sedan that can seat up to seven. You could probably put seven people and full luggage and still beat a McLaren F1.
What’s next? We’ve got to scale up our production to make millions of cars per year. I think in general, from a societalbenefits standpoint, we need to improve the cost of an electric powertrain to make the car more affordable. And we need autonomy. The next two massive disruptions for cars are electrification and autonomy, and they are happening at the same time, very basically. The future will be all electric, all autonomous. I don’t mean some electric, some autonomous, I mean all electric, all autonomous. Whether you like it or not, this is what’s going to happen. Ed Loh
