Stan Beer
Sunday, 27 August 2006 13:47
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 4
The people behind Tesla is a story in itself. The co-founders are
engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who together previously
co-founded NuvoMedia, which in 1998 launched the first e-reader, the
Rocket eBook. After selling NuvoMedia for US$187 million in 2000, the
pair founded Tesla, named after the enigmatic legendary electrical
engineer, in 2002 with a vision of building an electric car that people
actually wanted to drive.
According to Eberhard, apart from the battery storage problems,
electric cars in the past have always been designed by people who don't
like cars. Apparently, Silicon Valley, a place where personal transport
is mandatory, agrees with him because Tesla has some pretty powerful
backers there.
Of the US$60 million startup capital, about US$30 million was provided
by Tesla chairman Elon Musk, who co-founded PayPal. Other funders
include the Google boys Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
The Tesla car itself looks like any gas guzzling high performance
sports roadster and, according to all reports, it performs as well or
better than any of them. Although designed in Silicon Valley largely by
automotive engineers poached from Lotus, it is being made to order by
Lotus in the UK, while the batteries and the amazingly small electric
motor are made in Taiwan.
