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SpaceX and the Quest

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SpaceX and the Quest ( spacex-and-quest )

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batteries. They developed methods for arranging them in ways that would prevent fires spreading from one battery to the next and other techniques for stopping explosions altogether. Thousands of batteries exploded along the way, and the effort was worth it. It was still early days, for sure, but Tesla was on the verge of inventing battery technology that would set it apart from rivals for years to come and would become one of the company’s great advantages. The early success at building two prototype cars, coupled with Tesla’s engineering breakthroughs around the batteries and other technological pieces, boosted the company’s confidence. It was time to put Tesla’s stamp on the vehicle. “The original plan had been to do the bare minimum we could get away with as far as making the car stylistically different from a Lotus but electric,” said Tarpenning. “Along the way, Elon and the rest of the board said, ‘You only get to do this once. It has to delight the customer, and the Lotus just isn’t good enough to do that.’” The Elise’s chassis, or base frame, worked fine for Tesla’s engineering purposes. But the body of the car had serious issues in both form and function. The door on the Elise was all of a foot tall, and you were meant to either jump into the car or fall into it, depending on your flexibility and/or dignity. The body also needed to be longer to accommodate Tesla’s battery pack and a trunk. And Tesla preferred to make the Roadster out of carbon fiber instead of fiberglass. On these design points, Musk had a lot of opinion and influence. He wanted a car that Justine could feel comfortable getting into and that had some measure of practicality. Musk made these opinions clear when he visited Tesla for board meetings and design reviews. Tesla hired a handful of designers to mock up new looks for the Roadster. After settling on a favorite, the company paid to build a quarter-scale model of the vehicle in January 2005 and then a full-scale model in April. This process provided the Tesla executives with yet another revelation of everything that went into making a car. “They wrap this shiny Mylar material around the model and vacuum it, so that you can really see the contours and shine and shadows,” Tarpenning said. The silver model was then turned into a digital rendering that the engineers could manipulate on their computers. A British company took the digital file and used it to create a plastic version of the car called an “aero buck” for aerodynamics testing. “They put it on a boat and shipped it to us, and then we took it to Burning Man,” Tarpenning said, referring to the annual drug-infused art festival held in the Nevada desert. About a year later, after many tweaks and much work, Tesla had a pencils-down moment. It was May 2006, and the company had grown to a hundred employees. This team built a black version of the Roadster known as EP1, or engineering prototype one. “It was saying, ‘We now think we know what we will build,’” Tarpenning said. “You can feel it. It’s a real car, and it’s very exciting.” The arrival of the EP1 provided a great excuse to show existing investors what their money had bought and to ask for more funds from a wider audience. The venture capitalists were impressed enough to overlook the fact that engineers sometimes had to manually fan the car to cool it down in between test drives and were now starting to grasp Tesla’s long-term potential. Musk once again put money into Tesla—$12 million—and a handful of other investors, including the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, VantagePoint Capital Partners, J.P. Morgan, Compass Technology Partners, Nick Pritzker, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, joined the $40 million round.* In July 2006, Tesla decided to tell the world what it had been up to. The company’s engineers had built a red prototype—EP2—to complement the black one, and they both went on display at an event in Santa Clara. The press flocked to the announcement and were quite taken with what they saw. The

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