Loading ...from “Tesla’s wild ride”
By Michael V. Copeland, senior writer, FORTUNE MAGAZINE, July 9, 2008
You need to be a little nuts to start a car company. And by most accounts Martin Eberhard always was. In his early career, he launched a series of startups, including an electronic-book company he co-founded called NuvoMedia, which he sold to Gemstar in a deal valued at $187 million in 2000. By 2003 he was looking for his next project. Driving the streets of Palo Alto that year, he began to notice that the same driveways that held a Prius (or “dork mobile,” as he liked to call it) often also had a Porsche 911 or other luxury sports car.
“It was clear that people weren’t buying a Prius to save money on gas – gas was selling close to inflation-adjusted all-time lows,” says Eberhard, a tall, thin man with a mop of graying hair and a nervous, foot-tapping energy. “They were buying them to make a statement about the environment.” So why not, he reasoned, allow this deep-pocketed clientele to make that statement driving a car that exceeded the performance of a Porsche?
Eberhard, who has an undergraduate degree in computer engineering and a master’s in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, spent almost a year doing an analysis of what energy source was most efficient for his imagined eco-supercar. He examined and dismissed hydrogen fuel cells, natural-gas-powered cars, hybrid technologies, and diesel. The energy source that offered the highest efficiency and performance, he concluded, was pure electric. (more…)
