Cocconi bought a Piontek kit car, converted it to electric power, and renamed it to tzero. “We designed it to show that ultimate performance is available for electric vehicle technology,” Cocconi said. The plan was that the tzero would be the first in a series of the next generation environmental friendly vehicles. The name tzero originates from the engineering term t0, which indicates the first measurement of time in a sequence of several measurements, where t1 is the next measurement, and so on.
It was the tzero that convinced Hanks to buy an eBox. “I drove their tzero electric sports car a few years ago, so when they put the same technology in a four-door I wanted one for myself,” he said.219 The yellow tzero wouldn’t win a design competition, it had no safety systems, and it was expensive. But it was fast. When the car competed with a famous sports car, the Dodge Viper, the tzero had a better acceleration.33
Elon has always liked cars. He has owned, among others, a 2007 Porsche 911 Turbo, a Hamann BMW, an Audi Q7, the 1967 Series 1 E-type “bad girlfriend” Jaguar, and of course the McLaren F1.4 He used the Porsche as a family car. Two of his children could sit in the tiny back seat.190 But electricity didn’t power any of these cars.
Cars are the type of transportation that consumes the most oil. Out of the 20 million barrels of oil consumed each day in the US, cars are using 25 percent, light trucks are using 18 percent, heavy trucks are using 16 percent, and airplanes are using 6 percent. When there’s no more oil to fill the gasoline vehicles, then we have no other choice than to choose another type of fuel. Elon’s prophecy is that peak oil will happen in 2020, so he believes a majority of all new cars manufactured in year 2030 will be pure electric. 20 years after that, a majority of all cars on the roads will be pure electric.360 “There may be something cooler than a car in 20 years, but the most likely outcome is that we’ll still have cars and they’ll be predominantly electric,” Elon said.316
Alternatives such as ethanol or fuel-cells are not good enough compared with the electric alternative. Ethanol may work in countries where there’s plenty of room to grow the plants that will be turned into ethanol, but not in other countries. “Domestic ethanol as the primary solution will definitely not work for the world’s most populous countries, such as Japan, China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia,” Elon said. “Those countries are either breaking even on domestic food production or are net importers. If you argue that ethanol is to be grown elsewhere and shipped, where are the vast tracts of unused arable land?”248
Electricity is the best alternative because electricity is like cash – it can be generated in many ways. You can power an electric vehicle by generating electricity from coal, wind, solar, water, oil, natural gas, geothermal, or nuclear power.359
Electric vehicles are also energy efficient to use. Let’s say you produce electricity in a coal power plant. If you calculate the CO2 per mile if an electric vehicle is charged with electricity from the coal power plant, the electric vehicle will release less CO2 per mile compared with a hybrid car. This is because even without clean electricity production, it’s very efficient to produce power at a power plant. “What’s important to appreciate is that even if the power is 100 percent coal-generated, the CO2 per mile is still better than a gasoline engine,” Elon said. “The electric motor is incredibly good at turning energy into motion. Mostly what you’re doing with a gasoline engine in a car is generating heat.”57
In 2003, Elon went to a lunch in Los Angeles organized by Harold Rosen.199 With them was also JB Straubel, who first heard of Elon when he attended a Stanford University speech where Elon talked about SpaceX.214
At age 14, Jeffrey Brian Straubel, known to all as JB, discovered a discarded electric golf cart. He decided to rebuild it. To find the parts needed, he convinced his mother to drive as far as 50 miles [80 km] in search for batteries, tires, and electric motors. “He was passionate about it,” his mother said. “He wrote to the manufacturers for information. He worked on it every day, all day long, all evening long, until he got it to run. JB was born to be an engineer. He was always passionate about anything that had wheels and required engineering.” To motivate himself, he watch the movie October Sky. “I watch it every year or so,” he said. “It’s inspirational. I always come out of it wanting to work harder.”213,215
Straubel has always enjoyed the sound of silence. He can drive for hours without listening to music. This might be the reason to why he became fascinated by machines powered by electricity. “Electric vehicles don’t make much noise,” Straubel said. “When they do, something is not right.” Among other projects, he worked with unmanned electric airplanes, he converted a Porsche 944 to electric drive, and he constructed an electric bicycle nicknamed the Red Bike. He was also a fan of the EV1 and you can see him, or his unknown twin, driving it in the documentary Who killed the electric car? “I was talking to anyone and everyone to promote the idea that electric vehicles had turned a corner,” Straubel said. “I told them that with new battery technology, they could go much, much farther than anyone thought was possible.”213,215
Armed with two engineering degrees from Stanford University, Straubel joined Rosen Motors where he met Harold Rosen who was one of the founders. Rosen had previously worked within the space industry and he’s considered to be the father of the geosynchronous satellite. Straubel and Rosen left Rosen Motors and founded Volacom where they helped the company Scaled Composites – the same company that won the Ansari X Prize.39
Straubel and Rosen sat now at the lunch table together with Elon. The topic of the day was space, but they also talked about general topics. Elon mentioned how he came to California to work on a new battery technology for electric vehicles, and how he became interested in them before global warming became a hot topic. Maybe they laughed when Elon said he talked about cars with girls he dated. “And we talked about lithium-ion and what that meant for electric vehicle range.” Elon said. “The EV1 had a range of about 120 miles [190 km] or so with nickel metal hydride and so if you did a direct substitution of lithium-ion for nickel metal hydride, which has directly two times the energy density you get to around a 240–250 mile range, which would be acceptable to people.”199 It’s true because nearly eighty percent of all Americans drive less than 40 miles [64 km] a day.59
They began talking about AC Propulsion. Straubel, who had friends working at AC Propulsion, mentioned that the company developed early prototypes of electric sports cars, and the performance of these cars was good. After Elon told him he wanted to learn more, Straubel arranged a meeting with AC Propulsion so Elon could drive the tzero.
Despite the car’s disadvantages, Elon liked the ideas behind the tzero. He said it was a really awesome vehicle. For several months, Elon tried to convince AC Propulsion to accept funding from him to commercialize the tzero by creating an electric sports car for the mass market. But AC Propulsion was a small company. They wanted to tinker and experiment with their vehicles before they commercialized it, so they declined the offer. AC Propulsion also declined to sell a tzero to Elon and convert his Porsche to electric drive.199