Archive for the 'On the road' Category

One hectic week in June was all it took for the Tesla Roadster to make a lasting impression in northern Europe.

First stop was Norway where the environmental organization Bellona had invited Tesla Motors to show the roadster to European VIP’s at the C8 Climate Summit. The interest was overwhelming and VIPs like the former Norwegian PM Gro Harlem Brundland, international environmentalist Fredric Hauge and a number of CEO’s from the major oil companies took the roadster for an enjoyable spin.
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As I fly back from Brussels and think about the last 9 days in Europe I am very encouraged by what we learned. One of the advantages of a startup operation is the ability to change direction and make decisions very quickly to adjust to the opportunities and risks that present themselves. The flip side of that is that you often need to lead with your chin and accept the fact that you aren’t always entering the battle with your plans all in place. You become a master of rapid prototyping.

I start with a general observation about Tesla customers. Our new customers in the EU are every bit as dynamic and engaging as those who we have come to know in the US. It is not an exaggeration to say that one of the most extraordinary aspects of this company is the people who have signed up to reserve a Roadster. Those people, with wide ranging backgrounds, interests and motivations, share a vision and passion with Tesla’s employees to be part of something extraordinary and meaningful.

Many of the people who I have been interacting with, in person, on this blog or by email, have been following Tesla with a passion for several years, and this is something which I should have anticipated better when we communicated our entry into the European market.

European Pricing

When I announced the special, limited edition 2009 Euro-spec Roadster, I had not yet announced US pricing for the 2009 Tesla Roadster, which had increased to a $109,000 base price. I also communicated the price of the “signature edition” euro Roadster as a fully loaded offering, which compares to the fully loaded price of the 2009 Tesla Roadster of $120,200. This caused many people to compare the 99,000 Euro price of the limited edition car to the commonly quoted $98,000 price for the US version, with predictable results.

Where sometimes people talk about apples and oranges comparisons, this situation is a bit of an apples to oranges to pears to watermelons comparison. For starters, the car we are currently offering is a special, limited edition series of only 250 across the entire EU (Plus Switzerland and Norway) and it is priced at a premium to reflect that. That being said, a proper comparison should be made to the fully loaded 2009 price of $120,200 in the US (excluding taxes), not the $98,000 base price of the 2008 Roadster.

An important thing for our customers, both US and European, to keep in mind is that much of the cost of the Roadster is paid in Euros and Pounds. For that reason, as the dollar has weakened against the Euro (and other European currencies), we adjusted pricing accordingly. Not surprisingly, European carmakers are doing the same: in the April 30 edition of the Wall Street Journal Europe it is reported that BMW has made the decision to divert volume from the United States to other markets because their gross margins are under pressure due to the weak dollar and a Euro based cost structure. A final note on European pricing strategy relates to service centers and infrastructure. In the early going, we will be relatively “sub-scale” in Europe, with a higher cost of service and marketing infrastructure relative to sales. This is also reflected in our pricing.

While I thought it was important to address pricing, it really comes down to this:

The first 250 EU customers will receive a specially badged car that will no doubt be a collector’s item in the future. They will also be able to be the first Europeans to drive this amazing, rule-breaking, extraordinary car. Beyond that, we plan to offer other customizations for the car that will make it unique, but that will be a topic for future discussion.

The Top Marques Monaco Show

I’ll start by thanking Kory Tarpenning, the cousin of Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning, for turning us on to this show. Thanks also to Marc for putting us in touch. The show was a fantastic opportunity for us. Kory, who lives in Monaco, was an excellent host (especially to Diarmuid and Zak, who went out for a night on the town with Kory, and looked the worse for the wear from it the next day.) We had extraordinary interest at the Tesla booth from people from all over Europe, some of whom had flown in just to see the Tesla in person. After the first day, we pulled VP12 from the floor and kept it outside so that we could offer test drives to potential customers. I’m very glad we did that, because the experience of driving a high performance electric car up the mountains of Monaco or around the Monaco Grand Prix course is extraordinary. VIN F004, a car that is reserved by someone close to Tesla, stayed on the show floor for people to look at. Some notable visitors to our booth were former F1 champion Damon Hill, Prince Albert of Monaco and Bono. All of them knew a fair bit about Tesla and showed a great interest in the car.

We ended the show with a much better understanding of how we should approach Europe and what we need to do differently. For starters, we will be revamping our website and offering country and/or language specific content. We will be updating portions of the website that are outdated along the way.

We also ended the show with a good number of new European customers and hopefully an even larger number of future customers or brand ambassadors (some of whom comment on this blog).

An Update on Production

Since I inevitably get these questions, I should offer the update that VIN F003 has been delivered to its owner. VIN F002, which is reserved by co-founder Martin Eberhard, is soon to be shipped to the states. It had to stick around for a while because our quality team replaced the roof panel to improve the fit and seal and since the custom paint job involves the roof we couldn’t send it over and then send the roof later.

I don’t plan to offer car by car updates to the public but rather plan to communicate periodic milestones. The early stage of production is slow paced by design so that we can ensure quality and deal with any process problems before we ramp up to a higher rate. This has been and continues to be the plan. The production rate will slowly increase over the summer but then accelerate in the fall.

Furthermore, we are performing a higher than usual amount of post-production testing on these first cars. If we find anything we don’t like, we re-work it until it is right. The process is designed to have most of the kinks worked out by the time we ramp up to higher rates of production but comprehensive quality checks of every car will always be part of the plan.

Some Final Random Musings

I don’t envy Europeans who work for California based companies – just as the work day is winding down everybody is just getting going in California and the emails start flying.

The cost of food in Monaco is sky high, although I don’t believe it has anything to do with bio-fuels. As a result, we ate a lot of pizza.

I think the Cote D’Azur is a fabulous place for Tesla Roadsters.

Aside from standing at the booth, the most exercise I have had in months is transferring flights at the Frankfurt Airport.

For the first time in my life, crying babies in airports didn’t irritate me, they just made me miss my baby girl more.

As part of our European sales launch, Tesla Motors participated as an exhibitor at Top Marques Monaco April 24th - 27th where we met many of our first EU customers and many potential future customers. We have a blog in the works, but meanwhile we wanted to give you a glimpse of some photos.

Tesla Motors Exhibit at Top Marque

Bono in the Tesla Roadster

P4 on the Tesla stand at Top Marques

P4 and a general shot of the exhibition hall

P4 and VP12

Ex world champion F1 driver Damon Hill

The Tesla stand

VP12 outside the Fairmont Hotel
being charged overnight

VP12 beside a car popular in
Monaco - the Bentley Convertible

P4 on the stand
on its own

P4 on the Tesla stand

Darryl Siry being interviewed for
German television

Prince Albert II of Monaco visiting the Tesla stand

VP12 waiting to be driven in the pit area

Early in December we finally had the opportunity to have all of the top car magazines put the Tesla through its paces on the roads of northern California. This was a major milestone for Tesla in that, for the first time, we were handing over the keys to third parties who were not customers and letting them experience the car first hand. (I wrote a blog about it during the first day’s testing and while I revisit some of the same themes here, I’ve included a heckuva lot more eye candy to make it go down easy.).

For a new car company building a breakthrough product, this is no small thing. Tesla has been the subject of an extraordinary amount of attention for being the first to put forth the vision that a car can be zero-emissions and also a beautiful, fun car to drive. In the time since the unveiling of the early prototypes on July 19th, 2006 we have seen that trend catch on with the mainstream automotive manufacturers. In fact, the dirty little secret of the marketing department is that we rarely ever actually pitch a story to the media. The amount of incoming requests greatly exceeds our capacity to handle them. What we end up doing is triaging incoming opportunities and supporting those that make sense for what we are trying to get accomplished (it’s harder than it sounds. )

I may have marketing in my title but I can assure you it is a team effort managing all of the interest in the company – and that extends well beyond the marketing team to the engineers and other employees of Tesla.

This was all well and good in the early stages of the company, but the hard truth is that eventually you need to “put up or shut up” and deliver a great car to your customers. No amount of good press means anything if the product you build is not up to expectations.

So in the context of last fall, with a schedule delay and a leadership transition, handing over the keys to some pretty hard-nosed journalists was one part excitement, two parts anxiety. Many of us who drive the car have developed a sense of confidence that it is a great car, but of course we might be a bit biased . Some additional confidence was built up by our customer drive program, where over 100 customers drove the car.The response from our customers was great, but our customers are also a very passionate bunch of visionaries and progressive-minded people. What would the mainstream automotive press make of our Tesla Roadster?

The week of drives went very well, aside from the fact that the weather was nasty for all except Motor Trend. Each day consisted of several hours of driving, with both VP10 with a fixed gear transmission and VP9 with the 2-speed unit. After the drive, the journalists had an opportunity to spend a lot of time with the key engineers of the various subsystems of the car so that they could get the straight dope from the engineers (see photo below).

All of the journalists thought this aspect was great and some of them were like kids in a candy store, asking highly detailed technical questions and getting straight answers from the folks who actually do the design and manufacturing.At the end of the week we could all breathe a sigh of relief but the fact was we wouldn’t actually get a chance to see what was written for about 2 months. That kind of wait in today’s world of instant feedback is torture, but what can you do?

Resting at Alice’s Restaurant

“Well,” said some bloggers eager to try the car out, “you could just let us drive the car.” But the irony of the situation was that in a world where the internet and blogging has played such an important part in the development of the Tesla brand, it was actually the right decision to work with the traditional, long lead media (hence the title of this blog) to get our message out to the mainstream customer who still relies on the judgment and skill of the established automotive journalists like Csaba Csere, Editor-in-chief of Car & Driver.

Chat with Csaba

I made the decision to work with the long lead times of the traditional print media and refrain from offering the car up for test drives with bloggers until such time that the print magazines were about to hit the stands. The way I see it, for Tesla to become accepted into the mainstream as a legitimate car company, we need to offer the type of mainstream validation that comes with being in the pages of the magazines that most of our customers grew up with and still read.

Kissing cousins?

For all the talk of the death of old media, there is still value in the quality of journalism, trust built by decades of service, and the tactile look, feel and smell of a magazine in your hands as you read about the new car of your dreams. Besides, we will have plenty of time to let everyone drive the cars now that the magazines are hitting the stands.

Foggy Lane in Half Moon Bay

So here we are, with the first of the reviews from Motor Trend, AutoWeek and Road & Track hitting the web. I think the articles are great and I look forward to reading and seeing all the print versions! I heartily recommend going to the store and buying up all the copies (P.S. I heard a rumor we will be the cover of Automobile Magazine. If it is one of the shots they took of VP9 on a foggy lane in Half Moon Bay, it will be a beauty!)

Update: With the recent news about our plan for mass production with a higher powered, single speed drivetrain, it raises the important point of how the cars tested in these articles will be different from what is ultimately going to be delivered to customers. From the perspective of performance testing, I actually believe that our numbers will improve. The 0-60 should remain the same at about 4 seconds (which is the result that Motor Trend achieved). Where you will see significant improvement is in quarter mile times. With the lack of a shift and a better torque curve in the midrange (which in our motor would be defined as 6-10,000 rpm) we should see a much improved quarter mile times.

Motor Trend Technical Editor Kim Reynolds joined us for a day of driving Validation Prototypes 9 and 10 on Monday (December 3). Kim is an understated guy, but very knowledgeable about EVs. Kim knew Alec Brooks, Tesla’s Director of Vehicle Technologies, from way back and told me stories about “back in the day” when he used to let Alec and Al Cocconi bring the AC Propulsion’s t-zero over to the Motor Trend skidpad so he could help them understand how the car should behave on “throttle on” and “throttle off” while turning hard.

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