As Elon had no direct responsibility in the design process, he attended the Tesla board meetings once every six weeks, and he phoned every couple of days. They often used his private jet. “He lives in southern California, but he’d jump in his jet and fly up here at a moment’s notice,” Tarpenning said. “When we were trying to recruit some pretty high-level people from Detroit, Elon flew his jet here, picked us up and took us along to meet those people.” Also Eberhard was impressed by Elon’s lifestyle. “It was surreal. I’d go to visit him in my Mazda 3, and we’d go for a drive in his McLaren F1,” he said.205
Elon let Eberhard run Tesla without interfering in the daily work. Using skills gained from building rockets at SpaceX, Elon could often suggest new types of materials and techniques to use in the Roadster to save weight. He also worked with building the Tesla brand. “There were signs that he wanted to fiddle in the details, but it wasn’t enough to make me run screaming,” Wright said. “Musk is a technically savvy guy who wanted to help.” Elon, who had owned several of the world’s top sports cars, was particularly interested in the Roadster’s body styling. “You will see elements of two of my favorite cars, Porsche and McLaren F1, in the Roadster body,” he said.421
Nevertheless, by dint of his personality and controlling instincts, everyone noticed how Elon became more and more involved in the design process. Eberhard wasn’t the only manager the engineers had to ask if they wanted to make a change. “What will Elon think of that?” everyone asked themselves.196
Eberhard realized he and Elon had different priorities. While Eberhard wanted to finish the Roadster as soon as possible by using standardized parts, Elon wanted to redesign the standardized parts. “Elon wasn’t involved in the day-to-day management of the company,” Eberhard said. “His hands-on involvement was mostly pot shots. He would come in and get worked up about one particular thing on the car. He would get all fired up about door latches without contemplating their importance compared to the more difficult problems we had to solve. He would become obsessed. He couldn’t have a conversation without it being about the door latch.”205
The development of the Roadster turned into a tug-of-war between priorities. To design the logo, the look, and the feeling of the car, Eberhard wanted to spend $30 000 on a focus group. Elon canceled the project. To market the new Roadster, Eberhard hired a PR firm. Elon fired the PR firm because he thought his involvement in Tesla would give the company enough publicity. Elon let his wife test the car, and when she had trouble to get out of the car, it had to be redesigned. “Have you tried getting out of an Elise? It’s like you have to be a contortionist,” Elon said. After riding for a weekend in an early prototype, Elon insisted the seats had to become wider in the hip area and have more padding. To make the Roadster look, feel, and smell more like a sports car, the dashboard needed more leather. Elon wanted the door handles replaced with touch-sensitive microswitches at a cost of $1 million. The Roadster needed new lights. “My opinion was that if we had uncovered headlights it would look like a kit car – a little cheesy,” Elon said.196,205
To solve all these problems, Tesla needed to find new suppliers because Lotus hadn’t signed on to make new parts. “We learned that the car industry is unbelievably good at delivering what they’ve done in the past with a little tweak – faster, or in yellow,” Tarpenning said. “But if you want something a lot different – a simplified transmission that’s electrically actuated – that’s too radical. The designers and engineers who can do radical changes all left Detroit forty years ago.”59
When Tesla added everything needed to make a production car, including stereo and safety systems, the Roadster became heavier than the tzero and thus slower. “Why did DeLorean fail?” Elon asked. “Because it was a shitty sports car. It may have looked cool, but it had the acceleration of a Honda Civic.”196
Elon demanded a top speed of at least 125 mph [200 km/h]. Eberhard, on the other hand, was satisfied with a top speed of 110 mph [180 km/h]. “I thought it was an unnecessary risk for the first model year’s cars,” Eberhard said. “I was not proposing performance that sucked. We thought that we might just break 4 seconds [0–60 mph, 0–100 km/h] with Tesla’s additional weight, with our worst case estimates coming in around 4.8 seconds. This is still extremely quick for a sports car, and would have been a great car.”199
To increase the performance, the Roadster needed either an improved motor and electronics or a two-speed transmission. Tesla didn’t have the competence to rebuild the technology from AC Propulsion, so to get this improved performance, the Roadster needed a two-speed transmission. While the Elise used a transmission from Toyota, Tesla couldn’t find an existing transmission because an electric car is different from one powered by gasoline.199
Tesla hired a company to design this new transmission, but it didn’t work, so they changed to another company. The Roadster had been delayed by now, so this decision was rushed, and they chose this company because an engineer at Tesla in England had a contact there. It turned out that nor this transmission worked, so Tesla contacted a third company. Although they could build the transmission, it would be expensive. “Wow, so the huge development cost with a nominal timeline of like November 2008 and a high unit cost,” Elon said. “That’s pretty shitty.”199
Elon and Straubel had now become tired of the two-speed transmission and began discussing the original idea. “Hey, look, why don’t we look to going back to the single-speed approach and upgrading the motor power, and the power electronics current capability?” Elon asked. “We’d be better off with a single speed vehicle where we put more focus on increased torque and power out of the motor, rather than relying on this old-world solution of complicated gearboxes and moving mechanical parts.”199
To make sure they got a working transmission they contacted two companies. If both designs worked well, they would pick the lower cost option199,213 In September 2008, Tesla chose the company BorgWarner to manufacture a single-speed transmission.
Coloring was easier when Henry Ford made cars. He told his customers they could choose whatever color they wanted as long as they chose black. Why black? Black was the color that dried the fastest. But the Roadster came in twelve colors and each color needed a special name. “Oh boy, the naming took some time,” a Tesla employee said. “After several PR and design people took a run at it, we held a competition amongst the employees. We were running out of time. Three Tesla Motors executives were dragged into a conference room and were not allowed out until each color had an agreed upon name.” So the Roadster got colors like Electric Blue or Sterling Silver. It turned out that Radiant Red was the most popular color among the customers.270
The Roadster became more and more expensive and it took longer and longer to get it into production. “I always argued that we would sell exactly as many cars whether the door latches were push-button or electronic, whether the body panels were carbon fiber or fiberglass. All the nicer, cooler, faster stuff increased risk,” Eberhard said. But Elon disagreed. “I was very insistent on things during the design phase, and it is true those things cost money, but you can’t sell a $100 000 car that looks like crap,” Elon said. “On some of these changes I had to be quite forceful because Martin [Eberhard] didn’t want to spend the money.”196,209