Elon Musk insists that, in and of itself, “a US$100,000 sports car is not going to change the world.”
Musk is a 37-year-old technology entrepreneur who became extremely wealthy when eBay bought PayPal, which he had co-founded. A lanky South African, he is now using that wealth to fund two quixotic efforts. The first is SpaceX, a company he hopes will one day make it possible to colonize Mars. (I kid you not.)
The second is Tesla Motors, which was started in 2003 — Musk became its chief funder and board chairman in early 2004. After raising US$150 million and going through four years of technological and internal struggles, the company has begun manufacturing the first-ever all-electric sports car, the Tesla Roadster. Its base price is US$109,000. And if Musk is willing to concede that the Roadster, by itself, isn’t a world-changer, he fervently believes that the technology Tesla has created — technology that gives the car a range of 365km per battery charge, and enough acceleration to go from zero to 95kph in under 4 seconds — will indeed change the world. The age of the electric car, he is convinced, has dawned.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
The Tesla Roadster is a gorgeous sports car. That’s not a surprise: One of Tesla’s goals was to prove that an electric car didn’t have to look stodgy — or resemble something out of The Jetsons. Tesla’s other goal, though, was to show that an electric vehicle could provide a driving experience that was a good or better than any finely tuned sports car.
They appear to have succeeded at that as well.
“My experience was highly positive,” said Don Sherman, the technical editor at Automobile magazine who test-drove it last December. “It was a very exciting, very interesting piece of work that I found quite appealing.”
Though I’m no auto expert, I’d have to agree. I took the wheel for an hour last week and came away exhilarated by how quickly it accelerated, and how beautifully it handled. For the first time in my life, I had car lust.
So far the company has delivered four cars, with 27 more in production. It has 1,080 customers waiting patiently for a Roadster, which is a year behind schedule. (Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both Tesla investors, are scheduled to get cars seven and eight.) Tesla expects to be delivering four cars a week soon, and will double it.
But for all its sex appeal, the Roadster only hints at Tesla’s real ambition. By the end of 2010, Musk and his executive team expect to be manufacturing a five-seat, all-electric US$60,000 sedan. This, however, will be a much more expensive and difficult task — and many auto experts doubt that Tesla can pull it off. Which raises the question of whether the era of the electric car is really about to begin, as Musk believes — or whether the Tesla Roadster is little more than an expensive toy for rich people.
In the documentary Who Killed The Electric Car? — about the EV1, an all-electric car General Motors began making in 1996 and killed once and for all in 2003 — the filmmakers posit the theory that the vehicle was done in by a grand conspiracy involving the oil industry, the administration of US President George W. Bush and the car industry. But that’s not what happened. Gas was cheap when the EV1 was on the market; auto buyers preferred SUVs. And the technology didn’t allow the EV1 to become a viable mass-market automobile. Among its flaws, the EV1 used a nickel metal hydride battery that couldn’t get more than 120km before needing a charge.
“My daily commute was 37 miles [59km] one way,” wrote a man named Michael Posner on a Web site called The Truth About Cars, who drove an EV1 for several weeks back in 1997.
“Every trip was loaded with drama,” he said. “If I went to lunch, I gave up a few precious miles [kilometres]. That could mean disaster.”
At General Motors, they took to calling this problem “range anxiety.” Is it any wonder the car didn’t catch on?
Jump ahead a decade. Oil is now so expensive that everybody is thinking about alternatives to US$4.50-a-gallon gasoline. At the same time, the technology that makes electric cars possible has greatly improved. The development of lithium ion batteries, in particular, was such a great leap forward that it has made it possible, with enough additional innovation by electric car companies, to produce vehicles that get a range of more than 320km. Suddenly, an electric car seems viable.
And yet, and yet. Despite all this progress, we’re not close to being ready to mass-produce an electric car. For starters, everyone trying to build an electric car is coming at it from different directions. For instance, while the Tesla has a 450kg battery pack, consisting of over 6,800 cells (at an estimated cost of US$30,000), the new Aptera Typ-1 — a Jetson-mobile if ever there was one — uses a much smaller battery; its secret sauce is its aerodynamic shape, which dramatically reduces drag.
Bill Gross, the head of Idealab, which is behind Aptera, told me that he believes that when the car comes on the market late this year, it will sell for around US$29,000 — meaning of course that its business model is the opposite of Tesla’s.
Meanwhile, a third company, Phoenix Motorcars, is hoping to make traditional cars, like SUVs, that just happen to run on electricity. It will take years, if not decades, for the market to choose a winner, which, in turn, will keep consumers from committing to an electric car.
Secondly, even though the range of an electric car can extend to 320km or more, that is still not enough for people to abandon internal combustion engines.
For an electric car to truly take hold, the country will need some kind of national electric car infrastructure or a system in which batteries can be exchanged like propane tanks.
Then there are the manufacturing problems. Just because Tesla has succeeded in making an expensive electric sports car does not mean that it will be able to make a five-seat sedan. The latter is a more difficult quantum leap.
“If the Roadster costs US$100,000, how much will the sedan cost?” Sherman of Automotive magazine said. “It will have more doors, more seats, more metal, larger brakes. The operative word here is ‘more.’”
So where should we look, realistically, for a mass-market electric vehicle? Believe it or not, Detroit. In fact, the quick-fix approach that strikes me as the most promising comes from — surprise! — General Motors, the chief villain of Who Killed the Electric Car?
The Chevy Volt, which the company wants to bring to market in 2010, is a plug-in hybrid that aspires to travel 64km before switching to gasoline power. But the best part is that the combustion engine will recharge the battery — so it can switch back even while you’re driving.
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