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“I’m a pilot and love to fly, so this was perfect for me,” Straubel said. “The idea was that it would stay aloft for two weeks at a time and hover over a specific spot. This was way before drones and all that.” To help make ends meet, Straubel also worked nights and on the weekend doing electronics consulting for a start-up. It was in the midst of toiling away on all these projects that Straubel’s old buddies from the Stanford solar car team came to pay him a visit. A group of rogue engineers at Stanford had been working on solar cars for years, building them in a World War II–era Quonset hut full of toxic chemicals and black widows. Unlike today, when the university would jump at the chance to support such a project, Stanford tried to shut down this group of fringe freaks and geeks. The students proved very capable of doing the work on their own and competed in cross-country solar-powered car races. Straubel helped build the vehicles during his time at university and even after, forming relationships with the incoming crop of engineers. The team had just raced 2,300 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles, and Straubel offered the strapped, exhausted kids a place to stay. About a half dozen students showed up at Straubel’s place, took their first showers in many days, and then spread across his floor. As they chatted late into the night, Straubel and the solar team kept fixating on one topic. They realized that lithium ion batteries—such as the ones in their car being fed by the sun—had gotten much better than most people realized. Many consumer electronics devices like laptops were running on so-called 18650 lithium ion batteries, which looked a lot like AA batteries and could be strung together. “We wondered what would happen if you put ten thousand of the battery cells together,” Straubel said. “We did the math and figured you could go almost one thousand miles. It was totally nerdy shit, and eventually everyone fell asleep, but the idea really stuck with me.” Soon enough, Straubel was stalking the solar car crew, trying to talk them into building an electric car based on the lithium ion batteries. He would fly up to Palo Alto, spend the night sleeping in his plane, and then ride a bicycle to the Stanford campus to make his sales pitch while helping with their current projects. The design Straubel had come up with was a super-aerodynamic vehicle with 80 percent of its mass made up of the batteries. It looked quite a bit like a torpedo on wheels. No one knew the exact details of Straubel’s long-term vision for this thing, including Straubel. The plan seemed to be less about forming a car company than about building a proof-of-concept vehicle just to get people thinking about the power of the lithium ion batteries. With any luck, they would find a race to compete in. The Stanford students agreed to join Straubel, if he could raise some money. He began going to trade shows handing out brochures about his idea and e-mailing just about anyone he could think of. “I was shameless,” he said. The only problem was that no one had any interest in what Straubel was selling. Investors dealt him one rejection after another for months on end. Then, in the fall of 2003, Straubel met Elon Musk. Harold Rosen had set up a lunch with Musk at a seafood restaurant near the SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles and brought Straubel along to help talk up the electric plane idea. When Musk didn’t bite on that, Straubel announced his electric car side project. The crazy idea struck an immediate chord with Musk, who had been thinking about electric vehicles for years. While Musk had mostly focused on using ultracapacitors for the vehicles, he was thrilled and surprised to hear how far the lithium ion battery technology had progressed. “Everyone else had told me I was nuts, but Elon loved the idea,” Straubel said. “He said, ‘Sure, I will give you some money.’” Musk promised Straubel $10,000 of the $100,000 he was seeking. On the spot, Musk and Straubel formed a kinship that wouldPDF Image | SpaceX and the Quest
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