The growing prevalence of electric vehicles is no longer in doubt. And in the not-too-far future, this type of transportation has every chance to occupy a meaningful niche in the market. In the 90s of the last century, General Motors released the famous EV1 electric car, which was later docked. a film called “Who Killed the Electric Car?”
In the future, until recently, no vital endeavors were made to organize the mass production of such vehicles. Tesla Motors “risked”, deciding to give a great chance to cars on electric traction.
Elon Musk
Being engaged in entrepreneurship, billionaire Stark regularly brings to life the most daring and revolutionary ideas. Elon was born in 1971. in South Africa. As a 10-year-old child, he grew interested in programming. In 1992. an intelligent young man managed to enter the University of Pennsylvania. Seven years later, Musk became the founder of a large firm, X.com, specializing in ensuring the security of electronic payments. In 2000 X.com was bought out by another large enterprise, Confinity, and one of its subsidiaries, PayPal, also traded with electronic payments. After another 2 years, the online sale eBay bought out PayPal, which had already accomplished notable success. What should Elon Musk do with it? It’s simple: at that time, Elon owned 11.7% of PayPal’s shares, with a total value of $ 165 million.
In 2002 Musk invented his space launch vehicle firm called SpaceX. A year later, the prosperous specialist invested $ 10 million in the Solar City project, which entails the installation of modular solar panels in the homes of individuals. Besides, the enterprising scientist is quite serious about the colonization of Mars, and the launch of numerous satellites into orbit to provide Internet to all regions of our glorious planet. The different brainchild of Musk is the Hyperloop project, which contributes to the delivery of passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just half an hour (for reference, this is 600 km).
Given the above information, it is somewhat unexpected that Musk contributed to his Tesla Motors colleagues Martin Eberhard and Mark Tapping in 2004. Elon funded $ 7.5 million in a large-scale plan to construct electric cars.
Tesla Motors history
Enterprising engineers Martin Eberhard and Mark Tapping founded a company called Tesla Motors in 2003. As you know, Nikola Tesla was a Serbian scientist who studied electricity and made unprecedented findings for his time.
M. Tapping has long been affectionate of sports cars. The time came when the engineer was seriously interested in the problem of global warming and the severe dependence of vehicles on oil reserves on our planet. Besides, continuously rising fuel prices made them feel. Mark had no option but to design an electric car company in the state of California. From the very start, Musk participated in the formation of the long-term development strategy of the new company, was actively associated with the design of a new generation of automobiles, and enrolled the committee of directors of Tesla Motors.
In about 12 years, the company has reached the following results:
- Cars have created that move exclusively with the help of electricity, without the slightest need to use petroleum products in any form;
- Established a plant for the production of batteries for Tesla vehicles;
- The smallest distance that an electric car can cover is 300 km;
- The creation of components for electric cars from other manufacturers, for example, Smart ForTwo electric drive or Toyota RAV4 EV, was organized;
- A network of “electric” filling stations has been built, where you can refuel your electric car for half an hour without paying a cent, at the moment there are 370 such filling locations all over the planet; in the future, it is projected to include a paid service to replace a discharged battery with a new one;
- In the summer of 2014, I. Musk declared his purpose to open all his technical secrets for the production of electric cars. Thus, other manufacturers will also have the opportunity to produce this type of vehicle.
Tesla workers were ready to know the classic Musk, well-known to those who worked at SpaceX. Any problem, like fitting the Roadster’s carbon fiber body panels, Musk tackled head-on. He traveled to England on his plane to pick up the new body panel machining tools and individually deliver them to the French plant so that there is no downtime in the Roadster’s production schedule. “Elon said there was an emotional cost-cutting program to do,” Popple says. – He gave a talk, proclaiming that we will work on Saturdays and Sundays and sleep right in the workplace until the work is done. Someone complained that people are already working to their end and would not resist relaxing and spending time with their families. Elon responded, “These workers will have more than enough family time when we go bankrupt.”
Each Tuesday at seven in the morning, staff were challenged to refresh the bill of materials. The price of every item had to be known to the most related cent and had a reasoned plan to reduce it. For example, if at the end of December the motors cost $ 6,500 each, Musk necessitated that the cost is decreased to $ 3,800 by April. Cost analysis and discussion were conducted every month.
“If you befell following the plan, it was very expensive to fail,” Popple says. – Everyone knew that. People dropped their jobs if they could not solve the task at hand. Elon has a calculator in his head. If an irrational figure creeps into the presentation, he immediately notifies it. Elon does not miss a single detail. ” From Popple’s viewpoint, Musk’s authority style was determined, but he liked that Musk was always ready to listen to educated, carefully analyzed opinions and change his point of view if there were good intentions for this. I like that Elon did not try to embellish the truth. “
