When I look at this, I cannot how complicated it must be to build a world class automobile. Its all the more impressive that this is the first ground up(vs the roadster being an electric Lotus) car from a start up. Impressive indeed!
More or less what I was thinking while reading the article. How do you even staff up for something like this? I guess a lot of recruiting in Detroit or something.
"Huibert Mees is the Chassis Systems Technical Fellow responsible for the design and engineering of the Model S chassis systems. He joined Tesla from Ford Motor Company, where he was responsible for all the chassis systems and vehicle structure of the Ford GT supercar. Huibert has been working in the automotive industry for over 20 years, and was responsible for the rear suspension design of the Lincoln LS and Jaguar S-type as well as numerous advanced chassis design concepts at Ford."
Both SpaceX and Tesla are largely built on skimming the superstars out of the entrenched players. There are plenty of people that are really really good at their jobs at Boeing, Lockheed, Ford, General Dynamicsm, etc. They are generally underpaid, undervalued, and given little freedom relative to their skillset. But they stick around in those companies because that's where you have to be in order to work on really cool stuff like the Ford GT 40 or a space rocket.
Tesla and SpaceX offer the same cool stuff to work on, without the crappy low-value coworkers that never get fired, legacy systems holding you back, and the opportunity to do things as you believe they should be done.
This is part of why the old companies will have a hard time noncompeting. Not only are SpaceX and Tesla disrupting their business, but Elon Musk is stealing from their top tier talent pool that could defend against disruption.
If the market is any indicator, it believes Tesla is going to be successful. I bought several thousand shares at $17/share right after the IPO. TSLA closed today at 54.55/share.
How specifically did he recruit them? Did he just show up at the factory one day? (I'm really interested in the detailed logistical steps of how one starts a brand new car company)
If you want to take Tesla as an example for how to start a brand new car company:
1) Spend 6 years at an insanely high burn rate with zero revenue for research and development to create a marketable car
2) Have enough brand loyalty to delay delivery to your high-earning clientele multiple times
3) Hustle Daimler into investing to do payroll at the height of the financial crisis, with Daimler themselves having no money
4) Hustle the DOE into funding your fully electric sedan while having only a taped together basic model to show for it, with your competition (Toyota) being granted billions just to refit a factory
Interestingly, my friend who was interviewing with Tesla said that their HR was among the worst he ever talked to. Specifically, they didn't return emails and were quite inefficient.
Not as impressive (well, not to me) as how unnervingly clean the bottom of that car is. The roof of my car would be dirtier than that about 1 day after washing it.
I suppose this must be what owning a car in California is like.
Sounds awesome - I think some MIT guys are working on something similar with a liquid polymer that hardens with a laser. Are there any inherently very expensive parts of dmls, or is the expense due to low volume/high markups? What are the big barriers to a consumer-level version?
