A harsh winter climate is a problem if you are driving an electric vehicle. When the temperate drops to minus ten degrees Celsius [minus fourteen degrees Fahrenheit], the range of a Tesla will decrease by ten percent. This is primarily due cabin heating that requires more energy the colder it is. “The battery actually loses very little energy when cold,” Elon said. “Keeping batteries cold is actually the best way to preserve them. It only loses energy when keeping the pack warm for the convenience of the driver – so you don’t have to wait long to drive.”224
Other tests the Roadster had to endure included the Belgian Pavé test, where the car was driven over a harsh cobblestone road at high speed. Almost any car will break after 4000 [6400 km] to 5000 miles. “We finished that test and actually did quite well on it, had a very small number of failures. We had one bracket break on a front suspension component that we redesigned,” Eberhard said.200 During these types of tests, and because of the constant vibrations, you can only drive for 30 minutes before you need a break. One poor Tesla driver thought the Roadster would fly apart and his teeth would shake loose.453
There’s also a much longer durability test – about 50 000 miles [80 000 km] long. While driving on that track, one misery the car has to endure is a saltwater bath. “We did have some water getting into one of our cables,” Eberhard said. “So it required us to change the design of the cable and make sure it was simply more waterproof.”200
The German company Siemens manufactured the Roadster’s airbags. But Siemens became nervous because they didn’t know if Tesla knew how they would use their airbags. The only way to calm them down was to let Siemens do the crash tests themselves. Four hand built Roadster were transported to Germany and systematically destroyed.209
In July 2006, the first Roadster prototype was finally revealed. Celebrities like the movie star and politician Arnold Schwarzenegger attended the uncovering show at the Santa Monica Airport. Later the same year, Tesla showed the Roadster at the Los Angeles Auto Show where Schwarzenegger held a speech. “Every industry has to participate in the fight against global warming, and these clean, efficient alternative fuel vehicles are leading this environmental revolution,” he said. “I test drove this vehicle [the Roadster], and it is hot. I’m buying one for Maria [his wife], for her birthday.”336,355
Tesla’s Macintosh
You can compare the Roadster with Apple’s first computer, the Apple I. Elon’s vision was that the next car from Tesla would be comparable to Apple’s Macintosh.195 As with the DarkStar, the WhiteStar was also a codename, and the real name of the mid-price, mid-volume car, was Model S.
Perhaps the most important lesson learned from designing the Roadster was that it’s more efficient to not redesign someone else’s car. “The biggest single error we made with the Roadster was not starting from scratch,” Elon said. “It would have cost us less and resulted in a better car if we had started with a clean sheet. So it was like you wanted to build a house, couldn’t find the right house, so you try to fix an existing house and end up changing everything except for one wall in the basement.”190,235
Tesla hired Henrik Fisker to design Model S from a clean sheet. The Dane, who had designed the latest Aston Martin, had now a styling company called Fisker Coachbuild that conceived unique bodies for existing chassis.
When Fisker showed his design suggestions, Tesla thought they were horrible. And they thought they knew why. Fisker would soon work with a competing car at Fisker Automotive. Tesla suspected that the only reason why Fisker had accepted the job was that he wanted to get an insight in how the engineers at Tesla worked. A sort of industrial espionage.327 “The initial proposals he came with were pretty good, and then as we got into it they started getting worse and worse,” Elon said. “I was very puzzled as to why he was producing such awful designs for us. The design Fisker did for us was nicknamed ‘the white whale’ it was so bad. It turns out what he actually decided to do was to take our specifications for the Model S. He took that basic plans, shopped it, got it funded, didn’t tell us.”190,374
They sued each other, and the court ruled in favor of Fisker. “There is no reason I would design a car purposefully bad,” Fisker said. “That’s just ridiculous.” It’s common that the best car designers work with different auto manufacturers, and Tesla knew Fisker had founded his own car company. Fisker thought Elon needed to blame others for his own difficulties. “On a trivial level, it reminded me of the O.J. trial,” Elon replied to the court’s decision.374
To avoid a similar experience, Tesla created their own design studio in a small, white tent carved out of a corner in the back of the SpaceX factory. Now they needed a designer.
Despite the German-sounding name, Franz von Holzhausen was born in 1968 in Simsbury, Connecticut. After graduating from the Art Center College of Design, he worked for various car companies. He spent eight years at Volkswagen and Audi where he learned the German way to combine design with quality. Then he brought his knowledge to General Motors where he worked with the cars Pontiac Solstice and Saturn Sky. After leaving General Motors, the next challenge was working with Mazda’s Kabura concept. “So what I learned from all these positions was how to develop a brand,” von Holzhausen said. “I learned discipline from the Germans while in America – it is about the free spirit, the message is what a brand can do. Sometimes, when I’m driving on the freeway, I see people in cars that I’ve designed or helped design. I look closely, because I want to see what kinds of people are driving those cars.”239,241
A friend of a friend called von Holzhausen and told him he should consider working for Tesla. Von Holzhausen had earlier read about Tesla and he thought their solution was too complicated. But it turned out von Holzhausen planned to leave his current job because he had become sick of Mazda’s priorities. “We had just come off a car that was all about being green in the racing environment,” he said. “We had done a lot of work with sustainable materials. We were the only ones to have non-vinyl interiors in the industry, but the company was not really embracing it.”240
Because von Holzhausen wasn’t happy at Mazda, he decided to meet Elon. “I came up to Tesla and did a tour of the facilities and we talked about opportunities,” he said. “Here was a company that was putting all its marbles behind what it believed in. Until that time I had worked for companies that talked a good line, but their core values were in a different direction.” Elon gave von Holzhausen an offer he couldn’t refuse. If he joined Tesla, Elon would give him the opportunity to design a new car from a clean sheet. It’s a dream job for all designers, so von Holzhausen accepted the offer and became Tesla’s chief designer.240
Elon told von Holzhausen he wanted a four-door sedan that seated seven together with their luggage. “That’s an SUV, not a sedan,” von Holzhausen replied.210 Elon told him he wanted to redefine the sedan concept and he also needed a car with a capacity to carry himself, his wife, and his five children. So von Holzhausen set out on the mission to design Model S together with a team of designers. “We immediately began building the design team, which eventually grew to eleven people,” von Holzhausen said. “We worked grueling hours, fueled by countless take-out dinners, lunches and breakfasts, not to mention ample caffeine and snacks in the SpaceX cafeteria.”274