Among the readers of this site, one of the cars that elicits a lot of passion is the Tesla Roadster. The battery-powered Roadster and its provenance have elicited a great deal of discussion over the past nine months, in particular since the demotion and ultimately the departure of co-founder Martin Eberhard. This is a complex tale involving passionate entrepreneurs with that all-too-common but in many ways necessary human frailty known as ego. When humans interact, they often see the same results through their own mental filters.

People can see exactly the same thing and interpret it in many different ways. Unfortunately in today's media landscape, particularly on television, but also in blogs we often see a very cut-down sound-bite version of things. Sound-bites by definition are taken out of context. In and of themselves they often lead to incorrect or at least inaccurate conclusions.

With all of that in mind I was recently contacted by Tesla Motors Chairman Elon Musk. Musk wanted to discuss his role at Tesla, and hopefully fill in some of the gaps in the story. What follows after the jump is the phone conversion that I had with Musk recently as well as some comments from Martin Eberhard via e-mail exchanges. Eberhard's version of events is italicized.

Update: Just to be clear Elon Musk contacted me immediately after a previous article where I called into question his role in the development of the Roadster. He wanted to clear up what he felt were misconceptions of his role rather than to pitch a story idea about him.

Creating big things is generally the province of visionaries. All too often, big visions go hand in hand with big egos. Big egos are generally like electrons. Anyone who has studied sub-atomic particles knows that similarly charged particles repel each other. You can force them into the same space for a period of time but eventually they push each other apart. Such is often the case with startup companies.

Let's start with a little background. When Tesla Motors was first getting launched a few years back, as part of their initial investment in the company, the first two dozen or so people involved agreed to buy what became known as Founders Series cars. Initially, company founder Martin Eberhard who had the vision that became the Tesla Roadster intended to keep the first production unit for himself. When Paypal founder and seriously rich guy Elon Musk got involved as a major investor in Tesla Motors the situation changed. As Eberhard tells the tale (and I have no reason to doubt him on this) since Musk was putting up the bulk of the cash, he asked to get the first Roadster. After some back and forth Eberhard ultimately relented and took car #2. According to Martin:

During the entire time I was at Tesla, staff discussions about the early production cars rarely referred to the first two cars as "P1" and "P2." They were simply called "Elon's car" and "Martin's car." Everyone at Tesla knew this, and everyone knew how important these cars and their production sequence meant to both of us.

Continue reading the tale after the jump.

Way back in October 2006, while I was doing some research in Hawai'i, it hit me that the islands were the perfect place for a full-in electric car revolution. While the EV market hasn't produced the cars we'd like to see quite yet, it's still painfully obvious to me that powering a state full of electric cars using nothing but wind, wave and solar power seems more likely in Hawai'i than most other places (note that some of the renewable energy sources, like geothermal, are culturally complicated).

Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard is somewhat on the same page. He recently gave a talk at the Focus Green lecture series on Maui that touched on Hawaiʻi's drive to become a sustainable state, and that means lots of renewable energy. Martin suggested to the local audience that they turn clean energy generators into tourist destinations - who wouldn't want to see the Hawai'i wind farms? If you'd like to see the slides from the presentation and read more about the talk - which included mention of local high school student's EV conversions - check out the Tesla Founders blog.

[Source: Tesla Founders blog]

Deposed Tesla Motors founder Martin Eberhard only has a few more weeks to wait for delivery of his new Roadster. Series production is scheduled to start on March 17 and first car off the line that day is destined for the Eberhard family garage. In preparation for his new ride, Martin has been making some changes around the house including the installation of a solar array on the roof so that the Roadster doesn't add any load to the grid. The 5.2kW setup has been operating since November and Eberhard estimates that about two-thirds of its output will go toward energizing the Roadster. In the latest post on the Founders Blog, Martin runs through some of the ways you could calculate payback on the system. Based on just the savings from replacing grid power with solar the system pays back in twenty years. Looking at the gas that won't be used by the Roadster, the payback drops to nine and a half years. The biggest cost of the system actually turned out to be all the work involved in integrating it into the house's electrical system. Based on his personal experience, Martin proposes that new homes that are built should made solar ready so that retrofits could be a lot cheaper and easier.

[Source: Tesla Founders Blog]

When Martin Eberhard founded his Tesla Founders blog, he didn't want to be the only one writing about what working on the Tesla Roadster was like. Freed from the daily tasks working on the Roadster, Martin has invited other "post-Tesla people and other interesting people to write guest blogs" on his site. David Vespremi, former director of communications at Tesla Motors, is the first to take up the keyboard.

What I find most interesting in David's initial post there is just how closely the people inside Tesla were following the reservation system that Smart was using for the 2008 Smart Fortwo. As you might recall, the down payment on a Roadster is/was $5,000. Compare that to the diminutive Fortwo, which has the small reservation fee of $99.

That Smart has signed up 42,000 people for Smart Fortwo reservations shows just how powerful the $99 is, especially considering what that money is going towards. For David, spending that hundred dollars kept his family looking at the Smart while other options were considered and discared. David's piece is engaging and well-written, and comes highly recommended if you're interested in looking inside the mind of someone who cares about driving and his car's impact on the environment. If you're looking for a discussion on green cars you can buy in 2008, the post is a great place to start.

[Source: Tesla Founders Blog]

Over at Martin Eberhard's new soapbox, the TeslaFounders blog, he giveth and taketh away. First with the latter. When we first checked in with Martin a couple of weeks ago, he was writing about what he described as a Stealth Bloodbath. That post has since been redacted although it can be found in that fount of knowledge known as the Google cache. It just goes to show yet again that once something gets out on the world wild web, no matter how many lawyers you sick on it, it's unlikely to ever truly go away. By the way, Tesla's Darryl Siry didn't know who if anyone at Tesla actually contacted Martin about removing the post.

On the giveth side, Martin's latest entry talks about his encounter last year with Bob Lutz. When one of our colleagues encountered Eberhard checking out the Volt in Detroit last year, he was dismissive of the idea. However at some point after the show he had a private audience with Maximum Bob. Between that encounter and other discussions with people involved in the Volt program, he came to realize that GM was serious and the idea actually had merit in advancing the cause of vehicle electrification. You can read Martin's whole tale over his blog.

[Source: TeslaFounders.com]

When Tesla founder Martin Eberhard left the company recently, he announced he would soon be starting a blog where he would talk about what's going on. Well TeslaFounders.com went live earlier this week and if the latest post from Martin is any indication there are some very unhappy people who were formerly employed at the Silicon Valley start-up. At the blog and also over at the TeslaMotorsClub discussion forums there is plenty of discussion and stories from some of the people who have been let go recently. A lot of idealistic people joined Eberhard at the company and many of them feel betrayed now. They feel the company has abandoned the vision and it's all about getting the money out now.

Contacted for comment, Tesla VP Darryl Siry explained that the team was not organized effectively and there weren't clear lines of responsibility. As a result, targets were missed and as we all know now the company failed to meet it's goal of customer deliveries in 2007. One example given was the engineering group that had four different areas with overlapping responsibilities. As a result, things fell through the cracks. The entire engineering staff has now been consolidated under Chief Technical Officer JB Straubel. The new management team went through an appraisal and ranking of all employees in the company. Those that were found not to be meeting the requirements of the jobs that needed to be done were let go.

Continuing reading about what's going on at Tesla after the jump.

[Sources: TeslaFoundersBlog, Tesla Motors]

The saga of Martin Eberhard's abrupt departure from Tesla Motors continues to unfold. A story on the Green Wombat blog at Fortune's site has more details on what happened during Eberhard's last few days with the company he helped get off the ground. It appears that a personality conflict between Eberhard and Chairman Elon Musk was at least partly behind the firing.

It also looks like at least a majority if not all of the members of the Board of Directors had lost confidence in Eberhard's ability to get development of the Roadster back on track. Given the continuing issues that Tesla has had with transmission suppliers, things did not bode well for the chances of getting the WhiteStar sedan done on time and on budget.

[Source: Green Wombat, thanks to Peter for the tip]

Martin Eberhard's departure from active involvement in the operation of Tesla Motors came via a brief statement from the company late Friday evening after the Wall Street Journal broke the embargo on the story. When Martin was removed as CEO in August to focus on the getting the Roadster into production, he made a statement on the company blog about what was going on.

This time around, all references to Martin were promptly removed from the management team listing on the Tesla site. As you might expect, Martin's contract with Tesla prohibits him from making disparaging remarks about the company. As a result Martin has made a discrete yet telling statement on the Tesla Motors Club discussion forum. Martin didn't leave voluntarily and wasn't too thrilled with the way things went down. In the comments from the previous post about Martin's departure it appears a number of other people have left recently. Hopefully this is not a sign of how things will be happening moving forward at Tesla. You can see Martin Eberhard's comment after the jump and follow the whole discussion thread at the Tesla Motors Club forum.

[Source: Tesla Motors Club]

Tesla Motors has just announced that company co-founder Martin Eberhard has moved over to the company's advisory board. Last August Martin stepped down as CEO to take on the role of President of Technology and oversee getting the company's first product, the Tesla Roadster, into production. The car has been plagued by transmission problems which necessitated a supplier and significant re-engineering of even the replacement transmission design. Late this evening Tesla sent out a note that Martin Eberhard will be relinquishing that role as well to new CEO Ze'ev Drori. Martin Eberhard will no longer have any day-to-day involvement in running Tesla Motors or the Roadster program.

Although things have obviously not turned out the way he might have hoped for his company and car, Martin and the rest of the team deserve a lot of credit for trying and getting this far. The reality of building a complete and well-integrated car that meets all modern safety and customer requirements is an enormously difficult challenge regardless of what kind of drive-train it has. In a remarkably short period of time, the team at Tesla have come a lot farther than most of the efforts to build a viable electric car. The car I rode in recently was remarkably good in so many ways. Hopefully Martin Eberhard's dream car will come to fruition sooner rather than later.

Related:

• AutoblogGreen Q&A: Tesla Motors CEO Martin Eberhard pt.1
• AutoblogGreen Q&A: Tesla Motors CEO Martin Eberhard pt.2
• VIDEO: Riding the PCH and more in a Tesla Roadster!

[Source: Tesla Motors]

If you're one of our readers who likes to point out the many high hurdles that Tesla Motors has yet to scale in their quest to bring the Tesla Roadster to market, you're not along. In fact, Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard is right there with you. Eberhard says that, when it comes to engineering the Roadster, "what keeps me up at night is the complexity of the problem." The quote comes from the Unofficial Stanford Blog, which also has a video of the Tesla HQ and spends some time with the very same Roadster prototype (#10) that our own Sam Abuelsamid recently took for a test ride.

Min Liu and Nir Eyal of iinnovate spoke with Eberhard and reveal that he's been driving since he was 13. That's the age when he learned to drive on a farm. Pop psychology might tell us that the Roadster is the fulfillment of a lifetime of wishing the vehicle you're in could go faster while keeping the air and water clean so the crops can grow. Or something.

[Source: The Unofficial Stanford Blog, h/t to Domenick]

We reported the other day on a Wall Street Journal article on Tesla Motors and their Roadster which mainly covers the same ground that we and countless other outlets have discussed for the past year. Here's a little more context about what was said in that interview.

In the article company co-founder Martin Eberhard does acknowledge that building a real car and a viable business is no easy task. Martin has come away from this effort with a new-found respect for the issues that car-makers have to face in creating vehicles and bringing them to market. The task of meeting all the performance and safety requirements for modern cars has proved considerably more difficult than anticipated. This was especially true when combined with the job of integrating previously non-automotive technology like Tesla's lithium ion battery pack. They also had to deal with re-engineering required by the failure of components in testing. Then there is the problem of organizing the logistics of a world-wide network of suppliers for production. While Detroit automakers clearly made mistakes with their electric car programs in the 1990s, Martin acknowledges that they definitely know a lot more than most people give them credit for.

[Source: Wall Street Journal]

Recently, I wrote that Tesla's co-founder Martin Eberhard made a joke about the lack of quality in other electric car companies. Does Martin really feel that other electric car companies suck? YES! In a video interview (which you can watch below the fold) with the Wall Street Journal, Martin says all other electric car companies business approaches are "wrong" and they make "crap." Here is the full quote:

"In general, it seemed to me that, the way all other people started electric car companies, got in the business, was wrong. They wanted to make a car that would save the world. So, they needed to make a car that everyone could afford and they tried to come in at the bottom end of the market. They try to go up against very, very mature companies in a very, very mature industry. Every single component they buy costs them double what Honda or Hyundai or somebody pays for that same part. So they wind up with a car that's a piece of crap. No one wants to buy it.

No other industry does that happen. No other industry do you start in the low end and work your way up. Think about cell phones and flat panel TVs and camcorders and refrigerators and air conditioners. All these things start off as an expensive product and are sold to people who can afford it that are buying it not to save a lot of money but to experience the luxury of this new thing. That allows the companies to develop their technologies, to develop their supply chains and to drive the costs down, step by step as they reach a broader and broader market every time."

Martin also explains Tesla was delayed a year (from the original schedule) because they added safety equipment to the battery to absorb the heat of a burning cell. The safety equipment added 15 percent to the size of the battery and hundreds of pounds to the car's weight. The interview ends with Martin talking about the mistakes of DeLorean and Tucker that, of course, Tesla is not repeating either. If Tesla fails, this interview will not seem ironic at all.

Editor's UPDATE: if you're going to comment on this post, which you're welcome to do, please read the comments that have already been posted. Mr. Eberhard himself contributed and said the WSJ took his "piece of crap" comment out of context. Just want to make sure we're all aware about the full story here. Thanks.

[Source: Wall Street Journal]