Archive for the 'Vehicle Engineering' Category

For years as a child I read every car magazine I could get a hold of, reading them cover to cover and dreaming of the day that I could buy a car. That’s one of the strange things about growing up in an apartment in Flushing, Queens (New York City). You don’t really need a car in New York City, and if you don’t have a lot of money to throw around you really shouldn’t try. Street parking is a real problem, for starters, and renting a parking spot either at home or at your place of work is like paying rent all over again. Then there is the whole “theft” thing. I am told things have gotten better in the Big Apple since I have been gone, but I went through three CBR600s in three years, all stolen.

So it’s somewhat amazing to be sitting here today at the beginning of a very interesting week. Read more…

In the last installment of the driving dynamics blog, we explored the interplay between static mass distribution and power delivery in the Tesla Roadster. That’s a complicated way of saying that we looked at how the Tesla Roadster drives based on two key parameters: its chassis architecture (mid-“engine,” rear wheel drive) and power delivery characteristics (extremely broad, flat torque curve). By way of a quick refresher on the subject, the Tesla Roadster maintains the bulk of its mass, the battery pack, ahead of the rear axle and delivers its power to the rear wheels in a linear fashion.

Now let’s look at some of the further intricacies of weight and driving dynamics.

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The Tesla Motors Team is on the road to the Midwest and East Coast for our 2007 Spring Tour. While we will not have an official Tesla Tour T-Shirt (as good as that sounds, it has probably been done before by some folks that don’t look much like us), we can offer something a bit different: a day-by-day account of the trials and tribulations of life on the road and a companion photo album. In this travel diary of sorts, you’ll hear the good, bad, and ugly as the Tesla Motors Team embarks on our most ambitious customer outreach effort to date – hitting four major metropolitan markets in the span of just a few short weeks. So tune in and see the drama unfold here. Read more…

It doesn’t matter where we were going, on which freeway on-ramp we were merging, or even how fast the car was actually traveling. All that matters is that I was driving, I had a journalist riding shotgun, and I was just passing the imaginary apex of a decreasing radius turn with speed to spare. A lot of speed to spare. Oh, and there was a very solid looking concrete barrier occupying pretty much all of the real estate just ahead of the Tesla Roadster’s short red snout.

And then it happened… Read more…

I’ve been reading Michael Schnayerson’s book, The Car That Could, about the inside story on the development of General Motor’s EV1. It’s a fascinating read and I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of modern electric vehicle development. I had the good fortune of meeting the author during my first week at Tesla Motors. He was at our headquarters interviewing executives as part of a piece that he is writing for the May edition of Vanity Fair. (They publish an annual “green” edition each year in May.) As I read his account of the EV1 saga, I became acutely aware that we at Tesla Motors are, in a sense, writing chapters in a book that will be written one day. Read more…