7 ALL ELECTRIC

7 全电动车：超酷超快的特斯拉

特斯拉第一次将硅谷变成了底特律真实存在的威胁，至少在汽车概念上来说的确如此。

J. B. STRAUBEL HAS A TWO-INCH-LONG SCAR that cuts across the middle of his left cheek. He earned it in high school, during a chemistry class experiment. Straubel whipped up the wrong concoction of chemicals, and the beaker he was holding exploded, throwing off shards of glass, one of which sliced through his face.

J·B·斯特劳贝尔^{(J.B. Straubel)}左脸中间有一道两英寸长的伤疤。那是他高中时候的事了：一次化学实验课上，斯特劳贝尔因为误将几种化学溶液混合在一起，以致他紧握着的烧杯在手中爆炸了，玻璃碎片四处飞溅，其中一片就这样划伤了他的脸庞。

The wound lingers as a tinkerer's badge of honor. It arrived near the end of a childhood full of experimentation with chemicals and machines. Born in Wisconsin, Straubel constructed a large chemistry lab in the basement of his family's home that included fume hoods and chemicals ordered, borrowed, or pilfered. At thirteen, Straubel found an old golf cart at the dump. He brought it back home and restored it to working condition, which required him to rebuild the electric motor. It seemed that Straubel was always taking something apart, sprucing it up, and putting it back together. All of this fit into the Straubel family's do-it-yourself traditions. In the late 1890s Straubel's great-grandfather started the Straubel Machine Company, which built one of the first internal combustion engines in the United States and used it to power boats.

这道伤疤成了小发明家斯特劳贝尔的荣誉勋章，他的童年时光充斥着各种化学药品和实验设备。这个在威斯康星州出生的小男孩儿在他家的地下室里建造了一个很大的化学实验室，里面有一个通风橱，并且堆满了各种化学制剂，有买来的，有借来的，甚至还有偷来的。13岁那年，斯特劳贝尔在垃圾堆里找到一辆破旧的高尔夫球车，并把它带回家修理，还重新装配了发动机，这样一来，这辆车又能上路了。斯特劳贝尔似乎每时每刻都在拆解一些物件，然后进行一番改进，再把它们组装回去。所有的这些习惯其实都能够追溯到斯特劳贝尔家族提倡的自己动手的传统。19世纪90年代末，斯特劳贝尔的曾祖父创立了斯特劳贝尔机械公司，该公司建造了美国第一批内燃机，用于为船舶提供动力。

Straubel's inquisitive spirit carried him west to Stanford University, where he enrolled in 1994 intending to become a physicist. After flying through the hardest courses he could take, Straubel concluded that majoring in physics would not be for him. The advanced courses were too theoretical, and Straubel liked to get his hands dirty. He developed his own major called energy systems and engineering. “I wanted to take software and electricity and use it to control energy,” Straubel said. “It was computing combined with power electronics. I collected all the things I love doing in one place.”

正是斯特劳贝尔旺盛的求知欲引领他在1994年西行来到了斯坦福大学，成为这所大学的一名学生。起初他希望自己能成为一名物理学家，但是在尝试了所有能够选修的最难的课程之后，他得出结论认为物理专业或许并不适合自己，因为物理专业的进阶课程太理论化了，而斯特劳贝尔更喜欢亲自动手实践。于是斯特劳贝尔发展出了自己所谓的“能源系统与工程”专业。“我想学习软件和电力学相关课程，希望能够利用这些知识去控制能源，”斯特劳贝尔说，“我选的这些课程，其实就是计算机科学和电子电力技术的结合体。通过这样的方式，我把所有我喜欢做的事情联系到了一起。”

There was no clean-technology movement at this time, but there were companies dabbling with new uses for solar power and electric vehicles. Straubel ended up hunting down these startups, hanging out in their garages and pestering the engineers. He began tinkering once again on his own as well in the garage of a house he shared with a half dozen friends. Straubel bought a “piece of shit Porsche” for $1,600 and turned it into an electric car. This meant that Straubel had to create a controller to manage the electric motor, build a charger from scratch, and write the software that made the entire machine work. The car set the world record for electric vehicle (EV) acceleration, traveling a quarter mile in 17.28 seconds. “The thing I took away was that the electronics were great, and you could get acceleration on a shoestring budget, but the batteries sucked,” Straubel said. “It had a thirty-mile range, so I learned firsthand about some of the limitations of electric vehicles.” Straubel gave his car a hybrid boost, building a gasoline-powered contraption that could be towed behind the Porsche and used to recharge the batteries. It was good enough for Straubel to drive the four hundred miles down to Los Angeles and back.

这个时候清洁能源热潮还没有出现，但是已经有公司开始在太阳能和电动汽车领域试水了，希望能寻找到一些新的用途。斯特劳贝尔开始一一造访这些创业公司，在他们的车库里闲逛，并时不时设法结识那些工程师。与此同时，他还在自己与五六个朋友合租房子的车库里开始鼓捣自己的发明。斯特劳贝尔花1 600美元买了一辆“破烂不堪的保时捷”，然后将它改装成一辆电动汽车。这意味着斯特劳贝尔不仅需要制作一个电动车控制器、从零开始制造一个充电装置，还得开发出用于驱动整台设备的软件系统。这辆车创下了电动汽车加速性能方面的世界纪录——行驶1/4英里仅用了17.28秒。“我从这个过程中了解到现在的电子设备都非常棒，只需要一点点钱就足够给你的车加速，但是电池性能特别差，”斯特劳贝尔说，“充一次电，车子只能行驶30英里。这些信息让我意识到电动交通工具的一些局限性。”斯特劳贝尔为他的车装配了混合动力系统，并发明一个汽油驱动的设备挂在汽车后方，用于给电池充电。这套系统已经足够好了——斯特劳贝尔能开着它往返于400英里外的洛杉矶。

By 2002, Straubel was living in Los Angeles. He'd gotten a master's degree from Stanford and bounced around a couple of companies looking for something that called out to him. He decided on Rosen Motors, which had built one of the world's first hybrid vehicles—a car that ran off a flywheel and a gas turbine and had electric motors to drive the wheel. After it folded, Straubel followed Harold Rosen, an engineer famed for inventing the geostationary satellite, to create an electric plane. “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.

2002年，斯特劳贝尔搬去了洛杉矶。他已经拿到了斯坦福大学的硕士学位，并且换了几份工作，希望找到一些能够让他眼前一亮的东西。他先是去了罗森马达公司^{(Rosen Motors)}，这家公司建造了世界上第一辆混合动力交通工具。这是一辆装有飞轮和燃气涡轮的汽车，并由电动机驱动车轮转动。公司倒闭之后，斯特劳贝尔又追随公司创始人、以发明地球同步卫星而闻名的工程师哈罗德·罗森^{(Harold Rosen)}，与他共同研发电动飞机。“我是一名飞行员，也热爱飞行，所以这件事对我来说再好不过了，”斯特劳贝尔说，“我们的想法是这架飞机能够在空中持续飞行两周的时间，并且它还能够在某个指定地点上空盘旋。这已经远远超越现在的无人机以及类似产品所能达到的程度了。”为了实现这个目标，斯特劳贝尔还在晚上和周末为一家创业公司做一些电子方面的咨询工作，以维持自己的开支。

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.”

正当斯特劳贝尔为他的这些项目辛勤忙碌的时候，他在斯坦福太阳能车团队的老朋友前来探望他了。这是一群叛逆的工程师，数年如一日地在斯坦福的一间“二战”时期留下来的活动房内研制太阳能汽车——屋子里充满了各种有毒的化学药品，甚至还有黑寡妇蜘蛛。如果换作现在，斯坦福校方或许会对这样的项目给予支持，去赌一赌项目成功的概率，但是在当时，斯坦福却在试图阻止这些被边缘化的、疯子般的极客项目。这些学生最终证明了他们能够在没有校方支持的前提下独立开展自己的工作，并且还参与了一场太阳能动力车越野赛。斯特劳贝尔读大学时，甚至毕业之后，都参与建造了太阳能汽车，这也使得斯特劳贝尔和在团队里工作过的工程师们建立了良好的关系。这一次，团队成员刚刚从2 300英里之外的芝加哥赶来洛杉矶，斯特劳贝尔为这些精疲力竭而又手头吃紧的孩子提供了住处。差不多有五六个学生来到斯特劳贝尔家，这些孩子们洗了好多天以来的第一次澡，然后在地板上一个挨着一个地躺下了。大家围绕着一个话题聊到了深夜：他们意识到锂离子电池的发展——就像团队的车子上配备的那种太阳能电池——已经超出了大多数人的想象。许多消费类电子产品，比如笔记本电脑，使用的就是18650锂离子电池，它的外观和AA电池很像，并且可以被串联在一起。斯特劳贝尔说，“我们的想法是，如果把一万块这样的电池串联起来会发生什么？我们计算了一下，然后发现这足够汽车行驶大约1 000英里。这真的是一个很有书呆子气息的奇思妙想。后来我们都睡着了，但是这个点子却一直萦绕在我脑海里。”

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.

很快，斯特劳贝尔便缠上了太阳能车队，并试图说服他们制造一辆靠锂离子电池驱动的电动汽车。他会乘飞机去帕洛阿尔托市，在飞机上睡一晚，然后骑自行车到斯坦福校园去推销他的计划，并顺便帮助团队成员推进他们当前的太阳能车项目。斯特劳贝尔构思出的设计方案是一辆超空气动力学汽车，电池占据了其80%的重量，看上去有点像一个装有轮子的鱼雷。谁都不知道斯特劳贝尔对这款产品有什么长远的打算，包括他自己。他的这个点子与其说是为了组建一家汽车公司，不如说只是为了制造一辆概念车，让人们意识到锂离子电池的威力。运气好的话，他们可能会去寻找并参与到一场比赛中去。

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.

这些斯坦福的学生最终同意加盟斯特劳贝尔的项目，前提是他能够筹集到一些资金。于是斯特劳贝尔开始去各种交易展览会，派发关于自己想法的小册子，并且给所有他能想到的人发电子邮件。他说：“我的脸皮非常厚。”但问题在于没人对斯特劳贝尔所说的东西感兴趣。在接下来的几个月里，投资人一再拒绝了他。直到2003年秋天，他遇到了埃隆·马斯克。

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 would survive more than a decade of extreme highs and lows as they set out to do nothing less than change the world.

哈罗德·罗森曾与埃隆·马斯克在SpaceX洛杉矶总部附近的一家海鲜餐馆共进午餐。为了更好地说明并阐释那个电动飞机的点子，那次他带上了斯特劳贝尔。当发现马斯克对此并无太大兴趣的时候，斯特劳贝尔向他展示了自己的非正式项目——电动汽车。这个疯狂的点子一下子就拨动了马斯克脑中的一根弦——他思考电动汽车的潜在可能性已经有数年了。尽管马斯克一直专注于在汽车上使用超级电容，但当得知这些年来锂离子电池在技术上取得的进步时，他感到既激动又惊讶。“所有人都认为我疯了，但是埃隆认为这是一个好点子，”斯特劳贝尔说，“他说‘好啊，我会给你投一些钱的。’”斯特劳贝尔需要10万美元，马斯克承诺会投资1万美元。在那里，马斯克和斯特劳贝尔结下了深厚的友谊，这种情谊在接下来的10年一直伴随着他们。在这10年间，他们的命运也起起伏伏，毕竟他们所做的一切是为了改变这个世界。

After the meeting with Musk, Straubel reached out to his friends at AC Propulsion. The Los Angeles–based company started in 1992 and was the bleeding edge of electric vehicles, building everything from zippy midsize passenger jobs right on up to sports cars. Straubel really wanted to show Musk the tzero (from “t-zero”)—the highest-end vehicle in AC Propulsion's stable. It was a type of kit car that had a fiberglass body sitting on top of a steel frame and went from zero to 60 miles per hour in 4.9 seconds when first unveiled in 1997. Straubel had spent years hanging out with the AC Propulsion crew and asked Tom Gage, the company's president, to bring a tzero over for Musk to drive. Musk fell for the car. He saw its potential as a screaming-fast machine that could shift the perception of electric cars from boring and plodding to something aspirational. For months Musk offered to fund an effort to transform the kit car into a commercial vehicle but got rebuffed time and again. “It was a proof of concept and needed to be made real,” Straubel said. “I love the hell out of the AC Propulsion guys, but they were sort of hopeless at business and refused to do it. They kept trying to sell Elon on this car called the eBox that looked like shit, didn't have good performance, and was just uninspiring.” While the meetings with AC Propulsion didn't result in a deal, they had solidified Musk's interest in backing something well beyond Straubel's science project. In a late February 2004 e-mail to Gage, Musk wrote, “What I'm going to do is figure out the best choice of a high performance base car and electric powertrain and go in that direction.”

在与马斯克的会面结束之后，斯特劳贝尔找到了他供职于AC推进器公司^{(AC Propulsion)}的朋友。这家公司成立于1992年，总部位于洛杉矶，一直处于电动汽车产业的最前沿。该公司生产的产品涉及各个领域，包括从行人用的小型代步车到运动型跑车。斯特劳贝尔真的很想让马斯克看看Tzero——AC Propulsion公司目前最高端的原型车。这是一辆组装车，拥有玻璃纤维的车体和钢制的车骨架。1997年这款产品刚发布的时候，从起步加速到时速60公里仅需4.9秒。斯特劳贝尔和AC Propulsion公司的员工打交道已经几年了，于是他让公司负责人汤姆·凯奇^{(Tom Cage)}找来一辆Tzero给马斯克试驾。马斯克即刻就爱上了它，他认为这样一辆速度快到让人尖叫的电动车，能彻底改变电动车在人们心目中无趣又笨重的形象，从而将其变成一款备受追捧的产品。在接下来的几个月里，马斯克一直想要资助成立一个项目，欲将这辆原型组装车进行商业化量产，但是他一次又一次地被拒绝了。斯特劳贝尔说：“这是一款将想象中的概念实例化的产品，需要把它推广出去。我爱死AC Propulsion公司的这帮人了，可是他们似乎对于做生意一窍不通，因此拒绝了我们的商业化量产提议。他们一直试图向马斯克推销那辆名为Ebox的糟糕透顶的汽车。这玩意儿性能不好，而且也没有其他让人振奋的特点。”尽管和AC Propulsion公司的会谈连一桩交易都没有促成，但却让马斯克坚定地想要资助一些与斯特劳贝尔的科学项目类似，而且更加宏大的计划。2004年2月末，马斯克在一封发给凯奇的邮件里这样写道：“我想要做的是找到性能最好的原型汽车和电动发动装置，然后就一头扎进这个领域里。”

Unbeknownst to Straubel, at about the same time, a couple of business partners in Northern California had also fallen in love with the idea of making a lithium ion battery powered car. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning had founded NuvoMedia in 1997 to create one of the earliest electronic book readers, called the Rocket eBook. The work at NuvoMedia had given the men insight into cutting-edge consumer electronics and the hugely improved lithium ion batteries used to power laptops and other portable devices. While the Rocket eBook was too far ahead of its time and not a major commercial success, it was innovative enough to attract the attention of Gemstar International Group, which owned TV Guide and some electronic programming guide technology. Gemstar paid $187 million to acquire NuvoMedia in March 2000. Spoils in hand, the cofounders stayed in touch after the deal. They both lived in Woodside, one of the wealthiest towns in Silicon Valley, and chatted from time to time about what they should tackle next. “We thought up some goofball things,” said Tarpenning. “There was one plan for these fancy irrigation systems for farms and the home based on smart water-sensing networks. But nothing really resonated, and we wanted something more important.”

斯特劳贝尔不知道的是，几乎在同一时间，北加州的一些商业合伙人也开始对锂离子驱动电池的构想着了迷。马丁·艾伯哈德^{(Martin Eberhard)}和马克·塔彭宁^{(Marc Tarpenning)}在1997年创办了新媒体^(NuvoMedia)公司，该公司研发的火箭电子书^{(Rocked eBook)}是世界上最早的一批电子书阅读器之一。在NuvoMedia公司的工作经历赋予这两位创始人对于前沿消费类电子产品独到的洞察力，包括用改进的锂离子电池驱动的笔记本电脑和其他移动设备。尽管“火箭电子书”这款产品在那个时代有些过于超前，也没有令他们获得商业上的成功，但是这款产品的创新性引起了吉姆斯塔国际集团^{(Gemstar International Group)}的注意，这家公司旗下拥有《电视指南》^{(TV Guide)}期刊，并掌握着电子节目指南技术。2000年3月，吉姆斯塔国际集团以1.87亿美元的价格收购了Nuvo Media公司。完成这笔交易之后，两家公司的创始人彼此保持着密切的联系。他们都住在伍德赛德^(Woodside)，这是硅谷最富有的小镇之一，因此他们也经常聊下一步该做什么样的项目。“我们当时想到了一些特别傻的点子，”塔彭宁说，“当时有一个项目是去开发那些看似很酷的农田灌溉系统，还有安装了智能水传感网络的房屋。但是这些项目没能引起我们强烈的共鸣，我们想要一些更加重要的东西。”

Eberhard was a supremely talented engineer with a do-gooder's social conscience. The United States' repeated conflicts in the Middle East bothered him, and like many other science-minded folks around 2000 he had started to accept global warming as a reality. Eberhard began looking for alternatives to gas-guzzling cars. He investigated the potential of hydrogen fuel cells but found them lacking. He also didn't see much point in leasing something like the EV1 electric car from General Motors. What did catch Eberhard's interest, however, were the all-electric cars from AC Propulsion that he spied on the Internet. Eberhard went down to Los Angeles around 2001 to visit the AC Propulsion shop. “The place looked like a ghost town and like they were going out of business,” Eberhard said. “I bailed them out with five hundred thousand dollars so that they could build one of their cars for me with lithium ion instead of lead acid batteries.” Eberhard too tried to goad AC Propulsion into being a commercial enterprise rather than a hobby shop. When they rejected his overtures, Eberhard decided to form his own company and see what the lithium ion batteries could really do.

艾伯哈德是一个极有才华的工程师，并且很有社会责任感。美国在中东爆发的持续战乱一直令他深受困扰，并且在2000年的时候，他像其他尊崇科学思维的人一样，将全球变暖当作即将到来的现实。也正因此，他开始寻求替代汽油车的解决方案。起初，他调研了氢氧燃料电池，但是发现这类电池实在是太稀缺了。另外，他也不觉得去通用汽车公司租一辆EV1电动车有什么意义。然而，真正引发艾伯哈德兴趣的，是他在网上看到的AC Propulsion公司推出的纯电动汽车。于是，艾伯哈德于2001年来到了洛杉矶，考察了AC Propulsion公司的生产车间。“那地方就像一座鬼城一样，给人的感觉好像他们马上就要破产了，”艾伯哈德说，“我拿出50万美元帮这家公司渡过难关，让他们为我制造一辆使用锂离子电池而不是铅酸电池的电动汽车。”同样，艾伯哈德也试图让AC驱动器公司变成一家大型的商业公司，而不是像现在这种为业余爱好而生的小型车间。AC驱动器公司拒绝了艾伯哈德的提案，他决定创办自己的公司，探索锂离子电池真正的发展潜力。

Eberhard's journey began with him building a technical model of the electric car on a spreadsheet. This let him tweak various components and see how they might affect the vehicle's shape and performance. He could adjust the weight, number of batteries, resistance of the tires and body, and then get back answers on how many batteries it would take to power the various designs. The models made it clear that SUVs, which were very popular at the time, and things like delivery trucks were unlikely candidates. The technology seemed instead to favor a lighter-weight, high-end sports car, which would be fast, fun to drive, and have far better range than most people would expect. These technical specifications complemented the findings of Tarpenning, who had been doing research into a financial model for the car. The Toyota Prius had started to take off in California, and it was being purchased by wealthy eco-crusaders. “We also learned that the average income for EV1 owners was around two hundred thousand dollars per year,” Tarpenning said. People who used to go after the Lexus, BMW, and Cadillac brands saw electric and hybrid cars as a different kind of status symbol. The men figured they could build something for the $3 billion per year luxury auto market in the United States that would let rich people have fun and feel good about themselves too. “People pay for cool and sexy and an amazing zero-to-sixty time,” Tarpenning said.

艾伯哈德决定先在电子表格里画出一个电动车的技术模型。这样他就可以对各个部件进行理论上的微调，并观察这样调整会对汽车的外形和性能产生什么样的影响。他可以调整重量、电池数目、轮胎和车身阻力，并最终得出不同的设计方案分别需要多少节电池。这些模型显示出当时很火的SUV^{(运动型多用途车)}以及送货卡车之类的车型并不是理想的候选方案。相反，轻型的高档跑车似乎更加合适。轻型高档跑车的速度更快，能提供更有趣的驾驶体验，并且充满一次电的行驶里程远超一般人的预期。塔彭宁在做关于汽车的财务模型，这些技术细节恰好对他的发现做出了补充。丰田汽车公司的普锐斯汽车已经在加州发售了，而购买者大多是富有的、环保主义先驱者。“我们还得知EV1购买者的年均收入为20万美元。”塔彭宁说。雷克萨斯、宝马和凯迪拉克曾经的追随者将电动车及混合动力汽车当作一种与众不同的身份象征。这两位意识到他们可以为这个价值30亿美元的美国奢侈品汽车市场创造一些产品，让那些富人享受驾驶的乐趣，并自我感觉良好。“这款产品既酷又性感，而且还能不可思议地在短时间内从起步加速到时速60公里，人们愿意为它埋单。”塔彭宁说。

On July 1, 2003, Eberhard and Tarpenning incorporated their new company. While at Disneyland a few months earlier on a date with his wife, Eberhard had come up with the name Tesla Motors, both to pay homage to the inventor and electric motor pioneer Nikola Tesla and because it sounded cool. The cofounders rented an office that had three desks and two small rooms in a decrepit 1960s building located at 845 Oak Grove Avenue in Menlo Park. The third desk was occupied a few months later by Ian Wright, an engineer who grew up on a farm in New Zealand. He was a neighbor of the Tesla cofounders in Woodside, and had been working with them to hone his pitch for a networking startup. When the start-up failed to raise any money from venture capitalists, Wright joined Tesla. As the three men began to tell some of their confidants of their plans, they were confronted with universal derision. “We met a friend at this Woodside pub to tell her what we had finally decided to do and that it was going to be an electric car,” Tarpenning said. “She said, ‘You have to be kidding me.'”

2003年7月1日，艾伯哈德和塔彭宁组建了他们的新公司。几个月前和妻子在迪士尼乐园约会的时候，艾伯哈德就想到了特斯拉电动汽车这个名字。之所以取这个名字，一方面是为了纪念伟大的发明家和电动机先驱尼古拉·特斯拉，另一方面则是因为这个名字听上去很酷。在门洛帕克橡树林大道845号一栋建于20世纪60年代的破旧建筑里，两位创始人租了一间办公室，里面有三张书桌，两个房间。几个月后，第三张桌子就被伊安·莱特^{(Ian Wright)}占用了。他是一位工程师，在新西兰一座农场长大，在伍德赛德时和特斯拉的两位联合创始人是邻居。那时他们一起去推销他的人际关系创业公司，但这家公司无法从风险投资人那里筹得资金，莱特最后加盟了特斯拉。当这三人对他们的知己提起这项计划时，都毫无例外地遭到嘲讽。“我们在伍德赛德的一间酒吧见到了一位朋友，并告诉他我们最终决定制造电动汽车，”塔彭宁说，“她回答道，‘你们一定是在和我开玩笑吧。’”

Anyone who tries to build a car company in the United States is quickly reminded that the last successful start-up in the industry was Chrysler, founded in 1925. Designing and building a car from the ground up comes with plenty of challenges, but it's really getting the money and know-how to build lots of cars that has thwarted past efforts to get a new company going. The Tesla founders were aware of these realities. They figured that Nikola Tesla had built an electric motor a century earlier and that creating a drivetrain to take the power from the motor and send it to the wheels was doable. The really frightening part of their enterprise would be building the factory to make the car and its associated parts. But the more the Tesla guys researched the industry, the more they realized that the big automakers don't even really build their cars anymore. The days of Henry Ford having raw materials delivered to one end of his Michigan factory and then sending cars out the other end had long passed. “BMW didn't make its windshields or upholstery or rearview mirrors,” Tarpenning said. “The only thing the big car companies had kept was internal combustion research, sales and marketing, and the final assembly. We thought naïvely that we could access all the same suppliers for our parts.”

任何试图在美国创办汽车公司的人都会马上想到之前一家成功的汽车公司——创办于1925年的克莱斯勒。从零开始设计并建造一辆原型车总是会面临诸多挑战，但是更大的困难在于筹集大量资金和如何让汽车量产。正是这些挑战挫败了过去人们为成立一家新公司所付出的努力。特斯拉的创始人很清楚现实是什么样的。但他们意识到，特斯拉这位科学家在一个世纪之前发明了电动机，然后只需要制造一个传动装置，将电动机提供的动力传至车轮来驱动车辆，理论上这样就可行了。真正让人捏把汗的是建造用于制造车体以及相关部件的大型工厂。但是，特斯拉的创始人越是深入地研究汽车产业，就越发意识到，那些大型汽车制造商甚至都不再自己生产汽车了。亨利·福特时代将原材料从他位于密歇根的工厂一端输入，然后在另一端产出汽车成品的生产流程已经一去不复返了。“宝马车上的挡风玻璃、内饰，以及后视镜都不是自己公司生产的，”塔彭宁说，“这些大型汽车公司唯一保留着的三个部门是内燃机研究中心、销售推广部和总装配部。我们曾天真地以为我们也能找到同样的供应商，可以提供我们所需的零件。”

The plan the Tesla cofounders came up with was to license some technology from AC Propulsion around the tzero vehicle and to use the Lotus Elise chassis for the body of their car. Lotus, the English carmaker, had released the two-door Elise in 1996, and it certainly had the sleek, ground-hugging appeal to make a statement to high-end car buyers. After talking to a number of people in the car dealership business, the Tesla team decided to avoid selling their cars through partners and sell direct. With these basics of a plan in place, the three men went hunting for some venture capital funding in January 2004.

特斯拉的联合创始人想到的计划是从AC Propulsion公司取得Tzero车型的相关技术授权，然后用莲花Elise跑车的底盘作为车身的一部分。莲花汽车是一家英国汽车公司，于1996年发布了双门跑车Elise。这款车型拥有时髦的外观，紧贴地面的车身，这些特性都足够吸引高端跑车买家的注意。在和众多汽车交易市场从业人员交流之后，特斯拉团队决定不经过经销商，而是自己面向消费者直销。在确定了这些初步计划之后，2004年1月，这三人便开始寻找风险投资了。

To make things feel more real for the investors, the Tesla founders borrowed a tzero from AC Propulsion and drove it to the venture capital corridor of Sand Hill Road. The car accelerated faster than a Ferrari, and this translated into visceral excitement for the investors. The downside, though, was that venture capitalists are not a terribly imaginative bunch, and they struggled to see past the crappy plastic finish of this glorified kit car. The only venture capitalists that bit were Compass Technology Partners and SDL Ventures, and they didn't sound altogether thrilled. The lead partner at Compass had made out well on NuvoMedia and felt some loyalty to Eberhard and Tarpenning. “He said, ‘This is stupid, but I have invested in every automotive start-up for the last forty years, so why not,'” Tarpenning recalled. Tesla still needed a lead investor who would pony up the bulk of the $7 million needed to make what's known as a mule or a prototype vehicle. That would be their first milestone and give them something physical to show off, which could aid a second round of funding.

为了让他们的项目看起来更加可靠，特斯拉的创始人们从AC Propulsion公司借来了一辆Tzero跑车，然后开着它来到了位于沙丘路的风投一条街。与法拉利相比，这辆车起步加速更快，这种加速的感觉让投资人也兴奋了起来。但其不好的一方面是，一般的风险投资人想象力并不丰富，除了这辆奢华跑车表面蹩脚的抛光漆之外，他们很难看到更深层次的东西。仅有的两家愿意深入了解的风投公司是Compass Technology Partners^{(指南针技术伙伴公司)}和SDL Ventures^{(SDL风投公司)}，而且他们看上去并不怎么兴奋。Compass的首席合伙人和NuvoMedia公司之间的生意进展得很顺利，所以他对艾伯哈德和塔彭宁有一定的忠诚度。“他说‘这个想法太愚蠢了，但是我在过去40年里几乎投资过所有汽车公司，所以这次为什么不投呢’？”塔彭宁说。特斯来还需要一位主要投资人去填补剩下的700万美元的资金缺口，以便他们可以造出第一辆“骡子”，也就是原型车。这会是他们的第一个里程碑，能够让他们有一些实实在在的可以炫耀的东西，并且还能为获得下一轮融投资打下基础。

Eberhard and Tarpenning had Elon Musk's name in the back of their heads as a possible lead investor from the outset. They had both seen him speak a couple of years earlier at a Mars Society conference held at Stanford where Musk had laid out his vision of sending mice into space, and they got the impression that he thought a bit differently and would be open to the idea of an electric car. The idea to pitch Musk on Tesla Motors solidified when Tom Gage from AC Propulsion called Eberhard and told him that Musk was looking to fund something in the electric car arena. Eberhard and Wright flew down to Los Angeles and met with Musk on a Friday. That weekend, Musk peppered Tarpenning, who had been away on a trip, with questions about the financial model. “I just remember responding, responding, and responding,” Tarpenning said. “The following Monday, Martin and I flew down to meet him again, and he said, ‘Okay, I'm in.'”

从一开始，艾伯哈德和塔彭宁脑海中的主要投资人候选名单上就有埃隆·马斯克的名字。在几年前斯坦福召开的火星社区会议上，他们听过马斯克的演说。在那场演说中，马斯克展示了他关于将老鼠送上太空的宏伟构想。也正因为如此，在他们的印象中，马斯克是那种拥有与众不同想法的人，他或许会对电动车这个想法持开放态度。AC Propulsion公司总裁汤姆·凯奇告诉艾伯哈德，马斯克正在电动汽车领域寻找投资项目。得知这一消息后，他们要向马斯克推销项目的决心更加坚定了。艾伯哈德和莱特在周五乘飞机来到洛杉矶，与马斯克见了一面。那个周末，马斯克给在外远行的塔彭宁抛出了一大堆关于盈利模型的问题，“我只记得我在不停地回答、回答、再回答，”塔彭宁说，“接下来的周一，我和马丁再度乘飞机南下与他见了一面，然后他说，‘好吧，我决定加入你们。’”

The Tesla founders felt like they had lucked into the perfect investor. Musk had the engineering smarts to know what they were building. He also shared their larger goal of trying to end the United States' addiction to oil. “You need angel investors to have some belief, and it wasn't a purely financial transaction for him,” Tarpenning said. “He wanted to change the energy equation of the country.” With an investment of $6.5 million, Musk had become the largest shareholder of Tesla and the chairman of the company. Musk would later wield his position of strength well while battling Eberhard for control of Tesla. “It was a mistake,” Eberhard said. “I wanted more investors. But, if I had to do it again, I would take his money. A bird in the hand, you know. We needed it.”

特斯拉的联合创始人觉得自己很幸运，找到了他们的完美投资人。马斯克具有工程学方面的知识，因此能够理解特斯拉正在建造的东西。他还有着与他们同样的、更为远大的目标——试图使美国摆脱对石油的依赖性。“你需要一位像他这样有信念的天使投资人，对于他来说，这并不仅仅是一次金钱交易而已”，塔彭宁说，“他想去改变这个国家的能源天平。”马斯克以650万美元的投资成为特斯拉最大的持股人和董事长。之后，马斯克很好地运用了他手里的权利，与艾伯哈德竞争公司的控制权。“这是个错误，”艾伯哈德说，“我本应该去找更多的投资人，但是，如果我能重新再来，我还是会拿他的钱。一鸟在手，胜过二鸟在林。我们需要这笔钱。”

Not long after this meeting took place, Musk called Straubel and urged him to meet with the Tesla team. Straubel heard that their offices in Menlo Park were about a half a mile from his house, and he was intrigued but very skeptical of their story. No one on the planet was more dialed into the electric vehicle scene than Straubel, and he found it hard to believe that a couple of guys had gotten this far along without word of their project reaching him. Nonetheless, Straubel stopped by the office for a meeting, and was hired right away in May 2004 at a salary of $95,000 per year. “I told them that I had been building the battery pack they need down the street with funding from Elon,” Straubel said. “We agreed to join forces and formed this ragtag group.”

在这次会面发生不久之后，马斯克让斯特劳贝尔尽快和特斯拉团队见面。当得知特斯拉位于门洛帕克的办公室离他家只有大约半英里远时，他对他们的故事产生了兴趣，但却依然抱有一丝怀疑。在这个星球上没有人会比斯特劳贝尔更加了解电动车产业的现状，因此他很难相信一帮人能在这个项目上取得如此进展，而他却没有听到任何消息。2004年5月，斯特劳贝尔前往他们的办公室与之会面，并当场以9.5万美元的年薪被聘用了。“我告诉他们，在埃隆的资助下，我正在这条街的另一头制造他们需要的电池组，”斯特劳贝尔说，“我们决定合作，组建了这支杂牌军。”

Had anyone from Detroit stopped by Tesla Motors at this point, they would have ended up in hysterics. The sum total of the company's automotive expertise was that a couple of the guys at Tesla really liked cars and another one had created a series of science fair projects based on technology that the automotive industry considered ridiculous. What's more, the founding team had no intention of turning to Detroit for advice on how to build a car company. No, Tesla would do what every other Silicon Valley start-up had done before it, which was hire a bunch of young, hungry engineers and figure things out as they went along. Never mind that the Bay Area had no real history of this model ever having worked for something like a car and that building a complex, physical object had little in common with writing a software application. What Tesla did have, ahead of anyone else, was the realization that 18650 lithium ion batteries had gotten really good and were going to keep getting better. Hopefully that coupled with some effort and smarts would be enough.

如果当时有从汽车城底特律来的人前去特斯拉参观，他们一定会觉得很不可思议。这家公司的全部汽车专业知识仅止于此：一帮汽车爱好者，还有一个做了不少项目的人，但这些项目仅仅达到了科技展览的参展级别，并且在传统车行业的人看来，它们所依据的科技原理是很荒谬的。另外，创始团队里没有人打算去底特律的传统汽车制造商那里寻求建议。相反，特斯拉将要做的事情与在他们之前成立的那些硅谷创业公司一样——雇用一些年轻的、对新事物如饥似渴的工程师，然后顺着事情发展的趋势去思考下一步怎么走——不必担心硅谷湾区没有将这种模式运用于汽车领域的成功先例，也不必介意建造一个复杂的实体和开发一款软件之间几乎没有任何相似之处。但是特斯拉相比于其他人的优势在于，他们最先意识到18650锂离子电池的技术潜力，并且它的前景会越来越好。正是这一点，再结合他们的努力和智慧，将成为支撑起这家公司的希望所在。

Straubel had a direct pipeline into the smart, energetic engineers at Stanford and told them about Tesla. Gene Berdichevsky, one of the members of the solar-powered-car team, lit up the second he heard from Straubel. An undergraduate, Berdichevsky volunteered to quit school, work for free, and sweep the floors at Tesla if that's what it took to get a job. The founders were impressed with his spirit and hired Berdichevsky after one meeting. This left Berdichevsky in the uncomfortable position of calling his Russian immigrant parents, a pair of nuclear submarine engineers, to tell them that he was giving up on Stanford to join an electric car start-up. As employee No. 7, he spent part of the workday in the Menlo Park office and the rest in Straubel's living room designing three-dimensional models of the car's powertrain on a computer and building battery pack prototypes in the garage. “Only now do I realize how insane it was,” Berdichevsky said.

作为斯坦福大学的校友，斯特劳贝尔有一些直接渠道可以结识那些才华横溢且富有激情的工程师。他向斯坦福那帮工程师讲了关于特斯拉的事。吉恩·博迪切夫斯基^{(Gene Berdichevsky)}是斯坦福太阳能车团队的一名成员，当从斯特特劳贝尔那里听到特斯拉的消息时，他马上变得异常兴奋。这个斯坦福的本科生表示愿意退学，免费去给特斯拉扫地——如果这是他能在特斯拉谋得一份工作所必须做的事的话。创始人们很赞赏他的这种精神，于是在会面结束之后决定聘用他。博迪切夫斯基不安地给父母打了一个电话——他的父母是俄罗斯移民，都是核潜艇工程师——告诉他们自己要从斯坦福退学，然后加入一家电动车创业公司。在成为特斯拉公司第七位员工后，博迪切夫斯基部分时间在位于门洛帕克的办公室工作，其余时间则在斯特劳贝尔家的客厅用计算机设计汽车动力系统的三维模型，还在车库制作电池模型。“直到这个时候，我才意识到我的决定有多疯狂。”博迪切夫斯基说。

Tesla soon needed to expand to accommodate its budding engineer army and to create a workshop that would help bring the Roadster, as they were now calling the car, to life. They found a two-story industrial building in San Carlos at 1050 Commercial Street. The 10,000-square-foot facility wasn't much, but it had room to build a research and development shop capable of knocking out some prototype cars. There were a couple of large assembly bays on the ride side of the building and two large rollup doors big enough for cars to drive in and out.

特斯拉很快就需要扩张办公场所了，以便容纳日渐庞大的工程师队伍，他们还要建造一座工厂，用来打造他们的Roadster跑车。他们在圣卡洛斯商业大街^{(Commercial Street)}1050号找到了一栋两层的厂房。这块一万平方英尺的场地其实并不大，但作为研发制造厂房已经足够了，这使得他们能够制造出一些原型车。厂房右侧有一些装配区域，还有两个大型卷帘门，可供车辆进出。

Wright divided the open floor space into segments—motors, batteries, power electronics, and final assembly. The left half of the building was an office space that had been modified in weird ways by the previous tenant, a plumbing supply company. The main conference room had a wet bar and a sink where the faucet was a swan's mouth, and the hot and cold knobs were wings.

莱特将开放的楼层空间分为几个区域：发动机、电池、电力电子和最终装配部门。厂房的左边是办公区——这里被之前承租的一家管道工程公司改造得很奇特：主会议室内部有一个带水槽的调酒台、一个天鹅嘴形状的水龙头，还有两个翅膀形状的旋钮，分别控制冷水和热水。

Berdichevsky painted the office white on a Sunday night, and the next week the employees made a field trip to IKEA to buy desks and hopped online to order their computers from Dell. As for tools, Tesla had a single Craftsman toolbox loaded with hammers, nails, and other carpentry basics. Musk would visit now and again from Los Angeles and was unfazed by the conditions, having seen SpaceX grow up in similar surroundings.

某个星期天的晚上，博迪切夫斯基把整个办公室粉刷成白色。在接下来的一周里，员工集体外出去宜家买回了办公桌，然后在戴尔的网站上购买了电脑。特斯拉公司有一个工具箱，里面装满了锤子、钉子和其他基本的木工用具。马斯克偶尔会从洛杉矶来这里视察，但是他对于车间里的状况一点也不感到惊讶，因为SpaceX也是在类似的环境里成长起来的。

The original plan for producing a prototype vehicle sounded simple. Tesla would take the AC Propulsion tzero powertrain and fit it into the Lotus Elise body. The company had acquired a schematic for an electric motor design and figured it could buy a transmission from a company in the United States or Europe and outsource any other parts from Asia. Tesla's engineers mostly needed to focus on developing the battery pack systems, wiring the car, and cutting and welding metal as needed to bring everything together. Engineers love to muck around with hardware, and the Tesla team thought of the Roadster as something akin to a car conversion project that could be done with two or three mechanical engineers, and a few assembly people.

最初的计划听上去很简单，只是生产一辆原型车。特斯拉可以将AC驱动器公司的Tzero动力系统装进莲花Elise的车身。他们之前已经取得了电动机的设计方案，并打算从美国或欧洲购买变速器，然后将其他的零件制造业务外包给亚洲的生产商。特斯拉的工程师们在大部分时间里只需要专注于研发电池系统，装配环绕车身的各种线路，以及切割并焊接各种金属材料，以便把所有部件整合在一起。工程师们痴迷于生产硬件。整个特斯拉团队把Roadster当作一个汽车改造项目——只需要两三名机械工程师，再加上几个装配人员就能完成。

The main team of prototype builders consisted of Straubel, Berdichevsky, and David Lyons, a very clever mechanical engineer and employee No. 12. Lyons had about a decade of experience working for Silicon Valley companies and had met Straubel a few years before when the two men struck up a conversation at a 7-Eleven about an electric bike Straubel was riding. Lyons had helped Straubel pay bills by hiring him as a consultant for a company building a device to measure people's core body temperature. Straubel thought he could return the favor by bringing Lyons on early to such an exciting project. Tesla would benefit in a big way as well. As Berdichevsky put it, “Dave Lyons knew how to get shit done.”

原型车的核心制造团队由斯特劳贝尔、博迪切夫斯基和戴维·莱恩斯^{(David Lyons)}组成。莱恩斯是一名非常聪明的机械工程师，有近10年的硅谷工作经历，同时也是特斯拉的第12号雇员。几年前他在一家7–11^(7–Eleven)便利店结识了斯特劳贝尔，两人因斯特劳贝尔骑的一辆电动自行车聊了起来。莱恩斯曾聘请斯特劳贝尔担任某家人体核心温度测量仪制造商的顾问，以此帮助斯特劳贝尔维持生计。斯特劳贝尔认为，尽早让莱恩斯参与这个激动人心的项目是对他最好的回报。当然，特斯拉也在某种程度上获益良多。正如博迪切夫斯基所说，“戴维·莱恩斯知道怎么把这摊子事儿搞定。”

The engineers bought a blue lift for the car and set it up inside the building. They also purchased some machine tools, hand tools, and floodlights to work at night and started to turn the facility into a hotbed of R&D activity. Electrical engineers studied the Lotus's base-level software to figure out how it tied together the pedals, mechanical apparatus, and the dashboard gauges. The really advanced work took place with the battery pack design. No one had ever tried to combine hundreds of lithium ion batteries in parallel, so Tesla ended up at the cutting edge of the technology.

为制造原型车，这帮工程师买了一台蓝色的升降机，并把它安装在厂房里。他们还买了一些器械、手持工具，还有方便他们晚上工作的照明灯。整栋楼被他们改造成一个促成研究和创新的温床。电气工程师研究了莲花汽车的基础软件系统，试图弄明白它是如何将踏板、仪表盘和其他机械装置联结成一个整体的。那些真正精尖的技术集中在电池组的设计上。之前没有任何人尝试过将几百块锂离子电池并联在一起，所以从这个意义上来说，特斯拉处于电池技术的最前沿。

The engineers started trying to understand how heat would dissipate and current flow would behave across seventy batteries by supergluing them together into groups called bricks. Then ten bricks would be placed together, and the engineers would test various types of air and liquid cooling mechanisms. When the Tesla team had developed a workable battery pack, they stretched the yellow Lotus Elise chassis five inches and lowered the pack with a crane into the back of the car, where its engine would normally be. These efforts began in earnest on October 18, 2004, and, rather remarkably, four months later, on January 27, 2005, an entirely new kind of car had been built by eighteen people. It could even be driven around. Tesla had a board meeting that day, and Musk zipped about in the car. He came away happy enough to keep investing. Musk put in $9 million more as Tesla raised a $13 million funding round. The company now planned to deliver the Roadster to consumers in early 2006.

工程师们开始想要了解汽车的散热方式，并用强力黏合剂将70块电池粘成一块“电池砖”，然后试图了解电流传导方式会如何变化。之后，工程师们将10块电池砖组装在一起，测试不同气体和液体的散热机制。当特斯拉团队成功研制出了一个可用的电池组时，他们将这辆黄色莲花汽车的底盘延展了5英寸，用升降机将电池组安装到普通汽车后置式发动机所处的位置。这些工程从2004年10月18号就如火如荼地展开了，4个月之后的2005年1月27日，一款由18位工程师携手打造的新型汽车原型诞生了，人们甚至可以直接坐进去开着它去兜风。那天，特斯拉召开了一次董事局会议，马斯克坐在车里非常兴奋，离开时开心到决心继续投资这个项目。马斯克又投入了900万美元，特斯拉在此轮融资过程中总共筹得了1 300万美元。他们那时计划在2006年年初将Roadster批量生产。

Once they'd finished building a second car a few months later, the engineers at Tesla decided they needed to face up to a massive potential flaw in their electric vehicle. On July 4, 2005, they were at Eberhard's house in Woodside celebrating Independence Day and figured it was as good a moment as any to see what happened when the Roadster's batteries caught on fire. Someone taped twenty of the batteries together, put a heating strip wire into the bundle, and set it off. “It went up like a cluster of bottle rockets,” Lyons said. Instead of twenty batteries, the Roadster would have close to 7,000, and the thought of what an explosion at that scale would be like horrified the engineers. One of the perks of an electric car was meant to be that it moved people away from a flammable liquid like gasoline and the endless explosions that take place in an engine. Rich people were unlikely to pay a high price for something even more dangerous, and the early nightmare scenario for the employees at Tesla was that a rich, famous person would get caught in a fire caused by the car. “It was one of those ‘oh shit' moments,” Lyons said. “That is when we really sobered up.”

几个月后，当造出了第二辆车的时候，特斯拉的工程师们意识到他们不得不正视电动车模型一个巨大的潜在瑕疵。2005年7月4日，他们到艾伯哈德位于伍德赛德的家里一起庆祝美国独立日。这些工程师认为在这个美好的时刻，就应该做些有趣的事情——比如，看看Roadster的电池被点燃之后会发生什么事。其中一个人用胶带把20块电池绑在一起，还装了一条引信并把它点着了。“它像一簇火箭一样飞了出去。”莱恩斯说。相比这20块电池，装在Roadster上的电池有将近7 000块。光是想象一下那种规模的爆炸会产生什么样的后果，就把这些工程师吓出一身冷汗。相对于汽油车而言，电动车的一个优势就是，它能让人们远离汽油这类易燃液体，以及因发动机过热而导致的爆炸。有钱人不会花高价买一种危险品。早期特斯拉员工噩梦般的场景就是一个有名的富人因为这辆车而葬身火海。“这就是那些让你喊出‘噢，不’的时刻，”莱恩斯说，“那时我们每个人都清醒了。”

Tesla formed a six-person task force to deal with the battery issue. They were pulled off all other work and given money to begin running experiments. The first explosions started taking place at the Tesla headquarters, where the engineers filmed them in slow motion. Once saner minds prevailed, Tesla moved its explosion research to a blast area behind an electrical substation maintained by the fire department. Blast by blast, the engineers learned a great deal about the inner workings of the 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.

特斯拉成立了一个六人测试团队去处理电池的问题。他们放下手中的其他事务，拿着公司提供的经费去做各种实验。第一场试爆在特斯拉总部进行，工程师用慢速摄像模式拍下了全程。但是到了后来，理智占了上风，测试团队将爆炸实验转移到变电站后方的一块试爆场地，这里平时是有消防员维护的。在一次又一次的试爆过后，工程师们对电池内部的工作原理有了更充分的了解。他们找到一种排列电池的方法，能够阻止火焰从一块电池扩散至另一块。他们还找到了其他防止爆炸的方法。在这个过程中，他们已经消耗了几千块电池，但这些努力是值得的。尽管特斯拉还处于早期阶段，但是他们现在距研发出一种全新的电池技术仅一步之遥。这也是之后他们得以从竞争对手中脱颖而出的原因。这项技术将会成为这家公司未来最大的优势。

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.'”

在成功地制造了两辆原型车，并且在电池技术上取得关键性突破之后，特斯拉团队的信心大增。是时候在车上烙上特斯拉自己的印记了。“我们最初的想法是进行最低限度的改造，使得其在外观风格上有别于莲花汽车，而且是电动的，”塔彭宁说，“在这个过程中，马斯克和其他董事会成员说，‘你们只有一次机会来做这件事，最终的结果必须得让买车的人感到惊喜，而现在的莲花汽车在这方面做得还不够。’”

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.

Elise的底盘，或者说是车架，在满足特斯拉的工程用途方面可谓恰到好处。但是整个车身在形态和功能上都存在严重的问题。Elise的车门只有大约一英尺高，这就意味着你要么跳进车内，要么掉进车内——具体选择哪种方式取决于你身体的灵活性和你的脸皮有多厚。另外，车身还需要加长，以便安装特斯拉的电池组和储物箱。此外，特斯拉更倾向于采用碳纤维而不是玻璃纤维制造Roadster跑车。在相关的设计要点方面，马斯克的影响颇大，他提出了许多自己的观点。他想要一辆能够让贾斯汀坐在里面时感觉舒适的汽车，并且还要实用。马斯克把自己的观点在董事会和不定期召开的设计审查会议上都阐述清楚了。

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.

特斯拉聘请了几位设计师为Roadster跑车设计全新的外观造型。在从中选出一个大家最喜欢的造型之后，特斯拉先于2005年1月委托一家汽车模型生产商制作了一个1∶4的模型，又于4月制作了一个1∶1的模型。这个过程带给特斯拉的管理者们一些新的启发。“他们用闪亮的聚酯薄膜包裹在模型外面，然后使其处于真空状态，这时整个车身的轮廓便清晰可见，而且还有光影。”塔彭宁说。这个银色的模型之后被相应地转化为数据模型，工程师们可以在电脑上对其进行操控。一家英国公司利用这个数据模型建造了一个塑料版本的Roadster汽车模型，叫作“航空巴克”^(Aerobuck)，用于空气动力学方面的测试。“他们把它放在一艘船上运送给我们，然后我们把它带去了黑岩沙漠的火人节^{(burning man)[1]}”。

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.*

在将近一年之后，经过了大量的调整和完善，特斯拉的工程终于要告一段落了。那时是2006年的5月，公司员工人数已经增长到100人。这个团队建造了一辆黑色版本的Roadster，称为EP1或者一号工程原型机。“这辆车的诞生表明‘现在我们知道自己要制造什么样的产品了’，”塔彭宁说，“你能够切实地感受到它的存在，这是一辆货真价实的汽车，真的非常激动人心。”EP1的诞生为我们找到了一个很好的托词，可以让现有的投资人明白他们的钱都用来做了些什么，并且还能够向更广泛的投资人募集更多的资金。EP1给风险投资人们留下了深刻的印象，以至于他们都选择性地忽略了这个事实——工程师们有时候还得在两次试驾的间隙手动为车子散热。投资人们意识到了特斯拉长远的发展前景，马斯克再次为特斯拉投资了1 200万美元，许多其他投资人也投了钱，包括德丰杰风险投资公司^{(Draper Fisher Jurvetson)}、优点资本^{(VantagePoint Capital Partners)}、JP摩根、指南针技术伙伴公司，还有尼克·普瑞兹克^{(Nick Pritzker)}、拉里·佩奇和谢尔盖·布林，总数加起来有4 000万美元^[2]。

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 Roadsters were gorgeous, two-seater convertibles that could go from zero to 60 in about four seconds. “Until today,” Musk said at the event, “all electric cars have sucked.”

2006年7月，特斯拉决定向全世界宣布他们要做的事情。公司的工程师成功制造出了另一辆红色原型车EP2，作为黑色版本的补充。两辆车同时在圣克拉拉的一场展示会上亮相。媒体闻讯蜂拥而至，并且对他们看到的东西感到很满意。Roadsters太赞了，它是一辆双座敞篷跑车，从起步加速到每小时60英里只需要4秒。“在今天之前，”马斯克在会上说，“之前出现的那些电动车都糟糕透了。”

Celebrities like then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner showed up at the event, and many of them took test rides in the Roadsters. The vehicles were so fragile that only Straubel and a couple of other trusted hands knew how to run them, and they were swapped out every five minutes to avoid overheating. Tesla revealed that each car would cost about $90,000 and had a range of 250 miles per charge. Thirty people, the company said, had committed to buying a Roadster, including the Google cofounders Brin and Page and a handful of other technology billionaires. Musk promised that a cheaper car—a four-seat, four-door model under $50,000, would arrive in about three years.

州长阿诺德·施瓦辛格和前迪士尼CEO迈克尔·艾斯纳^{(Michael Eisner)}等名流都出席了这次活动，他们之中的许多人都亲自去试乘了这辆Roadsters跑车。然而，这辆汽车实在是太娇贵了，只有斯特劳贝尔和其他一些值得信赖的人才知道怎么驾驶。试驾人员每5分钟就要更换一辆汽车，以避免车体过热。特斯拉公布每辆Roadster汽车的售价为9万美元，一次充电能续航250英里。根据特斯拉的说法，当天有30个人当场承诺将购买Roadster汽车，其中包括谷歌的联合创始人布林和佩奇，还有许多科技领域的亿万富翁。马斯克承诺，特斯拉将会在3年内推出一款更便宜的、四座四门的车型，预计售价约为5万美元。

Around the time of this event, Tesla made its debut in the New York Times via a mini-profile on the company. Eberhard vowed—optimistically—to begin shipments of the Roadster in the middle of 2007, instead of early 2006 as once planned, and laid out Tesla's strategy of starting with a high-priced, low-volume product and moving down to more affordable products over time, as underlying technology and manufacturing capabilities advanced. Musk and Eberhard were big believers in this strategy, having seen it play out with a number of electronic devices. “Cellphones, refrigerators, color TV's, they didn't start off by making a low-end product for masses,” Eberhard told the paper.“They were relatively expensive, for people who could afford it.” While the story was a coup for Tesla, Musk didn't appreciate being left out of the article entirely. “We tried to emphasize him, and told the reporter about him over and over again, but they weren't interested in the board of the company,” Tarpenning said. “Elon was furious. He was livid.”

就在举办这场发布会的同时，特斯拉完成了它在媒体上的初次亮相，《纽约时报》刊登了一小段关于特斯拉的商业报道。艾伯哈德宣布，乐观估计第一批Roadster将在2007年年中交货，而不是之前计划的2006年年初。同时，他宣布了特斯拉的商业策略：从少量高价产品入手，然后随着核心技术水平和制造能力的进步，逐渐向大众负担得起的车型过渡。马斯克和艾伯哈德是这项商业策略的忠实信徒，他们见过许多电子设备公司的成功案例。“手机、电冰箱、彩电，最初并不是为大众设计的低端产品，”艾伯哈德在接受媒体采访时说道，“这些产品在当时都是比较昂贵的，是为那些具有相应购买力的人量身打造的。”尽管这篇报道对于特斯拉来说是一次很棒的宣传，但是马斯克却对这篇文章忽视他的存在而耿耿于怀。“我们尝试向媒体强调他的重要性，并和记者一遍又一遍地讲关于他的事情，但是他们似乎对公司董事会并不感兴趣，”塔彭宁说，“埃隆生气极了，简直是勃然大怒啊。”

You could understand why Musk might want some of the shine of Tesla to rub off on him. The car had turned into a cause célèbre of the automotive world. Electric vehicles tended to invoke religious overreactions from both the pro and con camps, and the appearance of a good-looking, fast electric car stoked everyone's passions. Tesla had also turned Silicon Valley into a real threat, at least conceptually, to Detroit for the first time. The month after the Santa Monica event was the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, a famous showcase for exotic cars.

你或许能够理解为什么马斯克希望特斯拉的光环能够笼罩着他。特斯拉汽车现在已经成为汽车世界的明星话题，电动汽车很容易在支持者和反对者团体中引发宗教般的过激反应。更何况，一辆帅气的高速电动跑车更容易点燃每个人心中的激情。特斯拉第一次将硅谷变成了底特律真实存在的威胁，至少在汽车概念上来说的确如此。圣克拉拉展览结束之后，著名的“加州卵石湾汽车巡展”^{(Pebble Beach Concoursd’Elegance)}开幕了，这是一场专为奇异风格的汽车举办的展会。

Tesla had become such a topic of conversation that the organizers of the event begged to have a Roadster and waived the usual display fees. Tesla set up a booth, and people showed up by the dozens writing $100,000 checks on the spot to pre-order their cars. “This was long before Kickstarter, and we just had not thought of trying to do that,” Tarpenning said. “But then we started getting millions of dollars at these types of events.” Venture capitalists, celebrities, and friends of Tesla employees began trying to buy their way onto the waiting list. Some of Silicon Valley's wealthy elite went so far as to show up at the Tesla office and knock on the door, looking to buy a car. The entrepreneurs Konstantin Othmer and Bruce Leak, who had known Musk from his internship days at Rocket Science Games, did just that one weekday and ended up getting a personal tour of the car from Musk and Eberhard that stretched over a couple of hours. “At the end we said, ‘We'll take one,'” Othmer said. “They weren't actually allowed to sell cars yet, though, so we joined their club. It cost one hundred thousand dollars, but one of the benefits of membership was that you'd get a free car.”

特斯拉在人群中引发的话题实在是太火爆了，以至于会议主办方甚至恳请特斯拉能派出一辆Roadster来参展，并且承诺免除展示过程中涉及的全部费用。于是特斯拉在会场内搭了一个展台，成群结队的人出现在展台前面，签下一张又一张10万美元的支票预订Roadster汽车。“这发生在众筹网站Kickstarter出现之前，我们那时根本没有想到可以做这样事情，”塔彭宁说，“但是我们之后就开始参加类似的展会，并从中获得了几百万美元的资金。”风险投资人、社会名流，还有特斯拉员工的朋友们开始试着通过花钱来购买预订汽车的名额。一些富裕的硅谷精英甚至直接找到了特斯拉总部，想买一辆车。企业家康斯坦丁·奥斯莫^{(Konstantin Othmer)}和布鲁斯·里克^{(Bruce Leak)}就做了这样的事。马斯克还在火箭科学游戏公司^{(Rocket Science Game)}实习的时候，这两位就认识他了。他们最后获得了一次长达数小时的自驾出行机会，用的是马斯克和艾伯哈德的车。“最后我们说‘我们决定买一辆’，”奥斯莫说，“他们还没正式开始销售呢，于是我们花10万美元加入了他们的俱乐部，而我们作为会员享受到的福利之一就是免费得到一辆车。”

As Tesla switched from marketing back into R&D mode, it had some trends working in its favor. Advances in computing had made it so that small car companies could sometimes punch at the same weight as the giants of the industry. Years ago, automakers would have needed to make a fleet of cars for crash testing. Tesla could not afford to do that, and it didn't have to. The third Roadster engineering prototype went to the same collision testing facility used by large automakers, giving Tesla access to top-of-the-line high-speed cameras and other imaging technology. Thousands of other tests, though, were done by a third party that specialized in computer simulations and saved Tesla from building a fleet of crash vehicles. Tesla also had equal access to the big guys' durability tracks made out of cobblestones and concrete embedded with metal objects. It could replicate 100,000 miles and ten years of wear at these facilities.

当特斯拉的重心从营销推广退回到研发领域的时候，技术上一些新的发展趋势对他们很有利。电脑计算能力的提升，使得小型汽车公司能够在某些方面和传统汽车巨头相媲美。几年以前，汽车制造商必须斥资配备一支车队用于碰撞测试。特斯拉承担不起这样的成本，也没必要承担。第三辆Roadster工程原型车采用了大型汽车公司所使用的撞击测试装置，这使得特斯拉有机会接触到顶级的高速摄像机和其他成像设备。其他数千项测试则是交给擅长计算机模拟的第三方机构去完成的，因此帮特斯拉节省了一大笔测试用车的成本。特斯拉还有同样的机会能够接触到测试汽车耐久度的赛道，这种赛道由河卵石和混有金属物体的水泥铺成，能够模拟汽车行驶10万英里和使用10年后的磨损程度。

Quite often, the Tesla engineers brought their Silicon Valley attitude to the automakers' traditional stomping grounds. There's a break and traction testing track in northern Sweden near the Arctic Circle where cars get tuned on large plains of ice. It would be standard to run the car for three days or so, get the data, and return to company headquarters for many weeks of meetings about how to adjust the car. The whole process of tuning a car can take the entire winter. Tesla, by contrast, sent its engineers along with the Roadsters being tested and had them analyze the data on the spot. When something needed to be tweaked, the engineers would rewrite some code and send the car back on the ice. “BMW would need to have a confab between three or four companies that would all blame each other for the problem,” Tarpenning said. “We just fixed it ourselves.” Another testing procedure required that the Roadsters go into a special cooling chamber to check how they would respond to frigid temperatures. Not wanting to pay the exorbitant costs to use one of these chambers, the Tesla engineers opted to rent an ice cream delivery truck with a large refrigerated trailer. Someone would drive a Roadster into the truck, and the engineers would don parkas and work on the car.

有些时候，特斯拉的工程师会把他们的硅谷作风带到传统汽车制造商经常出没的地方。在瑞典北部靠近北极圈的地方，有一条专门用于测试断裂和摩擦程度的赛道，在那里车子在大块的冰面上接受检修和调整。通常的做法是，在这里花两三天测试汽车，在得到数据之后返回公司总部，花费数周的时间开会讨论如何对汽车进行改造。相反，特斯拉派遣工程师来到了当地，一边测试汽车一边实地进行数据分析。当汽车的某些设置需要变动时，工程师们当场调整一些代码，然后再将车子送回冰上接受检测。“如果是宝马的话，他们可能需要召开一个涉及三四家公司的会议，然后相互指责对方造成了这个问题，”塔彭宁说，“我们就是自己把问题解决了。”另一个检测项目需要将Roadster置于一个特制的冷却室中，以便测试汽车在寒冷环境中的表现。因为不愿意支付天文数字的冷却室使用费，特斯拉的工程师们最终租了一辆带有大型冷冻车厢的冰激凌车。当某个人把Roadsters开进冰激凌车厢之后，工程师们就会穿上羽绒服，然后开始进行他们的研究工作。

Every time Tesla interacted with Detroit it received a reminder of how the once-great city had been separated from its own can-do culture. Tesla tried to lease a small office in Detroit. The costs were incredibly low compared with space in Silicon Valley, but the city's bureaucracy made getting just a basic office an ordeal. The building's owner wanted to see seven years of audited financials from Tesla, which was still a private company. Then the building owner wanted two years' worth of advanced rent. Tesla had about $50 million in the bank and could have bought the building outright. “In Silicon Valley, you say you're backed by a venture capitalist, and that's the end of the negotiation,” Tarpenning said. “But everything was like that in Detroit. We'd get FedEx boxes, and they couldn't even decide who should sign for the package.”

每当和底特律打交道的时候，特斯拉都会感受到这座曾经辉煌的城市如何背离了它的实干精神。特斯拉试图在底特律租一间小办公室。相比硅谷的房子，底特律的房租成本低得令人难以置信。但这座城市的官僚机构使得租用一个基本的办公场所都成了一项艰巨的任务。这栋楼的业主要求查看特斯拉7年以来的账目明细，而特斯拉那时还是一家私有企业。在此之后，业主又要求特斯拉预付两年的租金——特斯拉的银行账户里有将近5 000万美元，他们可以马上买下这栋楼。“在硅谷的时候，只要说明有风险投资人支持你，商谈就可以结束了，”塔彭宁说，“但是在底特律，所有事情都不一样，我们收到一份联邦快递送来的包裹，他们甚至不知道到底应该由谁签收。”

Throughout these early years, the engineers credited Eberhard with making quick, crisp decisions. Rarely did Tesla get hung up overanalyzing a situation. The company would pick a plan of attack, and when it failed at something, it failed fast and then tried a new approach. It was many of the changes that Musk wanted that started to delay the Roadster. Musk kept pushing for the car to be more comfortable, asking for alterations to the seats and the doors. He made the carbon-fiber body a priority, and he pushed for electronic sensors on the doors so that the Roadster could be unlocked with the touch of a finger instead of a tug on a handle. Eberhard groused that these features were slowing the company down, and many of the engineers agreed. “It felt at times like Elon was this unreasonably demanding overarching force,” said Berdichevsky. “The company as a whole was sympathetic to Martin because he was there all the time, and we all felt the car should ship sooner.”

在最初的几年，工程师们都很欣赏艾伯哈德迅速而果断的行事风格。特斯拉很少浪费时间过度分析某个问题。公司会选择一项策略，当这项策略在某些方面失败时，团队会迅速承认并接受失败，然后迅速做出调整并更换一项新的策略。真正拖延Roadster研发进度的，是马斯克想要实现的种种改动。马斯克希望车子具有更高的舒适度，要求对座椅和车门做出调整。他将碳纤维的车身放在了首位，然后要求在车门上安装电子传感器，这样一来，人们便可以通过手指触摸而不是拉动手柄去解锁。艾伯哈德抱怨说这些功能会拖慢整个公司的研发进度，许多工程师认同他的说法。“有时候，我们觉得埃隆就像此类不合理要求的邪恶力量——笼罩一切又无比苛刻，”博迪切夫斯基说，“整个团队都很同情马丁，因为马丁一直都在公司工作，而且我们也都觉得车子应该早点交货。”

By the middle of 2007, Tesla had grown to 260 employees and seemed to be pulling off the impossible. It had produced the fastest, most beautiful electric car the world had ever seen almost from thin air. All it had to do next was build a lot of the cars—a process that would end up almost bankrupting the company.

在2007年年中的时候，特斯拉的雇员人数已经增长到260名，他们似乎已经完成了不可完成的任务——几乎是从零开始生产出了世界上速度最快、造型最优美的电动车。他们接下来要做的事情就是将原型车量产，但这个过程差点让公司走到了破产的边缘。

The greatest mistake Tesla's executives made in the early days were assumptions around the transmission system for the Roadster. The goal had always been to get from zero to 60 mph as quickly as possible in the hopes that the raw speed of the Roadster would attract a lot of attention and make it fun to drive. To do this, Tesla's engineers had decided on a two-speed transmission, which is the underlying mechanism in the car for transferring power from the motor to the wheels. The first gear would take the car from zero to 60 mph in less than four seconds, and then the second gear would take the car up to 130 mph. Tesla had hired Xtrac, a British company specializing in transmission designs, to build this part and had every reason to believe that this would be one of the smoother bits of the Roadster's journey. “People had been making transmissions since Robert Fulton built the steam engine,” said Bill Currie, a veteran Silicon Valley engineer and employee No. 86 at Tesla. “We thought you would just order one. But the first one we had lasted forty seconds.” The initial transmission could not handle the big jump from the first to the second gear, and the fear was that the second gear would engage at high speed and not be synchronized with the motor properly, which would result in catastrophic damage to the car.

特斯拉的高层管理者们在早期阶段犯下的最大错误是，他们对于Roadster的变速系统做出了错误的假设。他们的目标一直都是尽量让汽车在最短的时间内从起步加速到时速60英里，希望Roadster在速度方面能够吸引更多的关注，并使驾驶体验变得更有趣。为了做到这一点，特斯拉的工程师决定采用一种两挡变速器，这是汽车内部将动力从发动机传送到轮胎的必要变速系统。第一挡的变速齿轮能够让汽车在4秒内从起步加速到时速60英里，然后第二个变速齿轮能够继续将车子加速到时速130英里。特斯拉将这个部件的生产任务委托给英国一家专业设计变速系统的公司Xtrac。特斯拉有充分的理由相信这将会是Roadster生产进程中相对比较顺利的环节。“自罗伯特·富尔顿开始建造蒸汽机以来，人们就已经开始制造变速系统了。”比尔·科瑞^{(Bill Currie)}说。他是一名资深的硅谷工程师，同时也是特斯拉第86号员工。他说，“我们的想法是，直接买一个就行了。但是我们的第一个变速箱仅仅运行了40秒。”最早的变速箱无法适应从第一挡变速齿轮到第二挡变速齿轮之间的落差，他们担心第二个变速齿轮在高速状态下不能很好地和发动机同步作业，并对车子造成灾难性的损坏。

Lyons and the other engineers quickly set out to try to fix the issue. They found a couple of other contractors to design replacements and again hoped that these longtime transmission experts would deliver something usable with relative ease. It soon became apparent, however, that the contractors were not always putting their A team to work on this project for a tiny start-up in Silicon Valley and that the new transmissions were no better than the first. During tests, Tesla found that the transmissions would sometimes break after 150 miles and that the mean time between failures was about 2,000 miles. When a team from Detroit ran a root cause analysis of the transmission to find failures, they discovered fourteen separate issues that could cause the system to break. Tesla had wanted to deliver the Roadster in November 2007, but the transmission issues lingered, and by the time January 1, 2008, rolled around, the company had to once again start from scratch, on a third transmission push.

莱恩斯和其他工程师马上着手解决这个问题。他们找到其他的承包商去设计替代品，并寄希望于这些经验丰富的变速系统专家能够相对轻松地制造出一些可以使用的产品。然而，事实证明这些供应商不会为了硅谷一家微不足道的创业公司去动用他们的顶尖团队。新的变速系统没有比旧系统好到哪里去。在测试过程中，特斯拉发现，有时候变速系统在行驶了150英里后就会出故障，每次故障之间的间隔距离大概为2 000英里。来自底特律的技术团队对变速系统进行了根本原因分析，发现了14个不同的问题，它们都有可能导致系统发生故障。特斯拉曾希望在2007年11月之前将Roadster交货，但变速系统的问题迟迟无法解决。到了2008年1月，特斯拉必须再次从零开始着手解决变速系统的问题。

Tesla also faced issues abroad. The company had decided to send a team of its youngest, most energetic engineers to Thailand to set up a battery factory. Tesla partnered with an enthusiastic although not totally capable manufacturing partner. The Tesla engineers had been told that they could fly over and manage the construction of a state-of-the-art battery factory. Instead of a factory, they found a concrete slab with posts holding up a roof. The building was about a three-hour drive south from Bangkok, and had been left mostly open like many of the other factories because of the incredible heat. The other manufacturing operations dealt with making stoves, tires, and commodities that could withstand the elements. Tesla had sensitive batteries and electronics, and like parts of the Falcon 1, they'd be chewed up by the salty, humid conditions. Eventually, Tesla's partner paid about $75,000 to put in drywall, coat the floor, and create storage rooms with temperature controls. Tesla's engineers ended up working maddening hours trying to train the Thai workers on how to handle the electronics properly. The development of the battery technology, which had once moved along at a rapid pace, slowed to a crawl.

与此同时，特斯拉也面临着来自国外的一些麻烦。公司决定派一批最年轻、最有活力的工程师去泰国，在那里成立一家电池工厂。特斯拉与一家十分热情但能力欠佳的生产商合作。特斯拉的工程师们原本以为会去泰国管理这个国家最先进的电池工厂，然而他们看到的并不是一个工厂，而是在一块混凝土地板上由几根柱子支撑起一个顶棚。这栋建筑距曼谷市区三小时车程，由于天气炎热，厂房大多数时间是敞开的，就像许多其他工厂一样。其他生产作业，比如制造炉子、轮胎和日用品等，能够在这样的温度条件下进行。但是特斯拉有敏感的电池和其他电子器件，就像“猎鹰1号”运载火箭的零部件那样，它们在碱性的、过于潮湿的环境中会被腐蚀。最终，特斯拉的合作方支付了7.5万美元，为这家工厂建起了干燥的墙壁，在地面上刷了一层涂料，还建造了几间可调控温度的储藏室。特斯拉的工程师们经历了一段让人抓狂的岁月，去努力培训泰国工人，教他们怎样妥善处理电子元件。曾经进展飞快的电池技术，现在也慢了下来，匍匐着艰难前进。

The battery factory was one part of a supply chain that stretched across the globe, adding cost and delays to the Roadster production. Body panels for the car were to be made in France, while the motors were to come from Taiwan. Tesla planned on buying battery cells in China and shipping them to Thailand to turn the piece parts into battery packs. The battery packs, which had to be stored for a minimal amount of time to avoid degradation, would then be taken to port and shipped to England, where they needed to clear customs. Tesla then planned for Lotus to build the body of the car, attach the battery packs, and ship the Roadsters by boat around Cape Horn to Los Angeles. In that scenario, Tesla would have paid for the bulk of the car and had no chance to recognize revenue on the parts until six to nine months had passed. “The idea was to get to Asia, get things done fast and cheap, and make money on the car,” said Forrest North, one of the engineers sent to Thailand. “What we found out was that for really complicated things, you can do the work cheaper here and have less delays and less problems.” When some new hires came on, they were horrified to discover just how haphazard Tesla's plan appeared. Ryan Popple, who had spent four years in the army and then gotten an MBA from Harvard, arrived at Tesla as a director of finance meant to prep the company to go public. After examining the company's books early in his tenure, Popple asked the manufacturing and operations head exactly how he would get the car made. “He said, ‘Well, we will decide we're going into production and then a miracle is going to happen,'” Popple said.

电池工厂是特斯拉横跨全球供应链的一部分。这也为Roadster额外增加了金钱和时间成本。车身的面板由法国制造，而发动机则由中国台湾制造。特斯拉还打算在中国大陆购买单块电池，然后运到泰国组装成电池组。电池组必须妥善储存，然后要在最短的时间内将它们运送到英国去清关，以防止它们降解。特斯拉计划由莲花汽车公司生产车身，然后再把电池设备安装好，最终将Roadsters整车经由好望角海运至洛杉矶。在这种情况下，特斯拉早已经为Roadster投入了大量资金，至少要在6~9个月之后才能确认销售收入。“我们的想法是去亚洲，以便宜的价格快速将事情办好，然后靠车子赚钱。”弗雷斯特·诺斯^{(Forrest North)}是被派去泰国的工程师之一，他这样说道。“但事实证明，对于这些无比复杂的事情来说，在美国做会更省钱，并能减少延误和麻烦。”当新雇员入职的时候，他们会惊恐地发现特斯拉的计划看上去十分随意。莱安·波普^{(Ryan Popple)}曾在军队里待过4年，获得了哈佛大学的MBA^{(工商管理学硕士)}学位，之后担任特斯拉的财务总监，任务是为公司上市做准备。在仔细审阅了公司的账本之后，波普问生产部主管汽车到底是怎样生产出来的。“他回答说，‘我们决定要批量生产了，然后奇迹就会出现，替我们搞定一切。’”波普说。

As word of the manufacturing issues reached Musk, he became very concerned about the way Eberhard had run the company and called in a fixer to address the situation. One of Tesla's investors was Valor Equity, a Chicago-based investment firm that specialized in fine-tuning manufacturing operations. The company had been drawn to Tesla's battery and powertrain technology and calculated that even if Tesla failed to sell many cars, the big automakers would end up wanting to buy its intellectual property. To protect its investment, Valor sent in Tim Watkins, its managing director of operations, and he soon reached some horrific conclusions.

当得知生产过程中出现了问题时，马斯克对于艾伯哈德管理公司的方式感到担忧。于是他让一个中间人介入此事，来处理当前的状况。私募基金Valor Equity是一家位于芝加哥的投资公司，也是特斯拉的投资人之一，致力于优化企业的生产方案。这家公司被特斯拉的电池和动力系统所深深吸引。他们盘算即使特斯拉没能卖出大量的汽车，那些传统的汽车巨头也依然愿意购买特斯拉手中的知识产权。为了使自己的投资得到保障，Valor Equity派来了公司的运营管理总监蒂姆·沃特金斯^{(Tim Watkins)}。不久之后，他就得出了一些令人惊恐的结论。

Watkins is a Brit with degrees in industrial robotics and electrical engineering. He's built up a reputation as an ingenious solver of problems. While doing work in Switzerland, for example, Watkins found a way to get around the country's rigid labor laws that limit the hours employees can work, by automating a metal stamping factory so that it could run twenty-four hours per day instead of sixteen hours like the factories or rivals. Watkins is also known for keeping his ponytail in place with a black scrunchie, wearing a black leather jacket, and toting a black fanny pack everywhere he goes. The fanny pack has his passport, checkbook, earplugs, sunscreen, food, and an assortment of other necessities. “It's full of the everyday things I need to survive,” said Watkins. “If I walk ten feet away from this thing, I sense it.” While a bit eccentric, Watkins was thorough and spent weeks talking to employees and analyzing every part of Tesla's supply chain to figure out how much it cost to make the Roadster.

沃特金斯是英国人，拥有工业机器人和电子工程学位。他以一个天才的问题解决者的身份而出名。比如，在瑞士工作的时候，沃特金斯找到一种能够摆脱当地严格的劳工法案限制的方法。他建造了一个可以24小时工作的自动化金属冲压工厂，而竞争对手的工厂每天只能运转16个小时。沃特金斯之所以有名，还因为他总会把他的马尾辫用一条黑色发带整整齐齐地缠好，同时穿着黑色的皮夹克，并且无时无刻不带着一个黑色的腰包。这个腰包里有他的护照、支票簿、耳塞、太阳镜、食物，还有其他各式各样的必需品。“里面装满了我每天的生活必需品，”沃特金斯说，“只要离开这个腰包10英尺远，我就会感知到哪里不对劲。”尽管有点古怪，但沃特金斯做事非常缜密，他会花好几周的时间和员工聊天，然后调查特斯拉供应链的每一个环节，试图弄清楚生产一辆Roadster到底需要多少钱。

Tesla had done a decent job of keeping its employee costs down. It hired the kid fresh out of Stanford for $45,000 rather than the proven guy who probably didn't want to work that hard anyway for $120,000. But when it came to equipment and materials, Tesla was a spending horror show. No one liked using the company's software that tracked the bill of materials. So some people used it, and some people didn't. Those that did use it often made huge errors. They would take the cost of a part from the prototype cars and then estimate how much of a discount they expected when buying that part in bulk, rather than actually negotiating to find a viable price. At one point, the software declared that each Roadster should cost about $68,000, which would leave Tesla making about $30,000 per vehicle. Everyone knew the figure was wrong, but it got reported to the board anyway.

特斯拉在控制员工成本方面做得还不错。他们选择雇用年薪只需4.5万美元的斯坦福大学应届毕业生，而不会选择那些已经混出了点名堂的人，因为即使每年能拿到12万美元的年薪，这些人也不会认真工作。但是在设备和原材料方面，特斯拉的开销太惊人了。大家都不喜欢使用公司的记账软件，所以有些人用，有些人不用。那些使用记账软件的人经常犯一个严重的错误：他们会用原型车某个部件的单价去预估大量购入时的折扣，而不是去和卖方实地商定一个可行的价格。在某个时间点，这个软件显示每辆Roadster的成本大约为6.8万美元，也就是说，特斯拉销售一辆汽车就能赚到3万美元。每个人都知道这个数字是错的，但他们视而不见，依然将数据汇报给董事会。

Around the middle of 2007, Watkins came to Musk with his findings. Musk was prepared for a high figure but felt confident that the price of the car would come down significantly over time as Tesla ironed out its manufacturing process and increased its sales. “That's when Tim told me it was really bad news,” Musk said. It looked like each Roadster could cost up to $200,000 to make, and Tesla planned to sell the car for only around $85,000. “Even in full production, they would have been like $170,000 or something insane,” Musk said. “Of course, it didn't much matter because about a third of the cars didn't flat-out fucking work.”

在2007年年中的时候，沃特金斯带着他的调查结果找到了马斯克。马斯克对于这个天文数字已经做好了心理准备，但他坚信，在不久的将来，随着生产计划步入正轨和销量不断提高，汽车的成本会慢慢降低。马斯克说，“当蒂姆告诉我真相时，我觉得这无异于晴天霹雳。”生产一辆Roadster的成本看似可能高达20万美元，而特斯拉预期的售价只有8.5万美元。“就算是全线生产，成本也会达到大约17万美元或者某个疯狂的数字，”马斯克说，“当然，这不重要，因为有1/3的汽车根本无法使用。”

Eberhard made attempts to pull his team out of this mess. He'd gone to see a speech in which the famous venture capitalist John Doerr, who became a major investor in green technology companies, declared that he would devote his time and money to trying to save the Earth from global warming because he owed such an effort to his children. Eberhard promptly returned to the Tesla building and ginned up a similar speech. In front of about a hundred people, Eberhard had a picture of his young daughter projected onto the wall of the main workshop. He asked the Tesla engineers why he had put that picture up. One of them guessed that it was because people like his daughter would drive the car. To which Eberhard replied, “No. We are building this because by the time she is old enough to drive she will know a car as something completely different to how we know it today, just like you don't think of a phone as a thing on the wall with a cord on it. It's this future that depends on you.” Eberhard then thanked some of the key engineers and called out their efforts in public. Many of the engineers had been pulling all-nighters on a regular basis and Eberhard's show boosted morale. “We were all working ourselves to the point of exhaustion,” said David Vespremi, a former Tesla spokesman. “Then came this profound moment where we were reminded that building the car was not about getting to an IPO or selling it to a bunch of rich dudes but because it might change what a car is.”

艾伯哈德尽了最大的努力试图把他的团队从这潭泥沼中拯救出来。有一次，他去听了著名风险投资人约翰·杜尔^{(John Doerr)}的一场演讲。杜尔后来成为环保科技公司的主要投资人。在这场演讲中，他向大家宣布，他会把自己的时间和金钱全部投入环保事业，试图在全球变暖的热潮中拯救地球，因为这是他亏欠他孩子们的。艾伯哈德迅速赶回特斯拉大楼，并做了一次相似的演讲。在大约100人面前，艾伯哈德将他小女儿的照片投影在主车间的墙上。他问特斯拉的工程师为什么他要放这张图片。其中一个人猜想是因为像他女儿一样的人会喜欢开特斯拉。艾伯哈德回答道，“不，我们现在之所以要制造这辆汽车，是因为等到我女儿长大了，到开车的年龄时，她对于汽车的认识将会和我们今天的认识完全不同，就像现在我们会认为电话不应该是挂在墙上并且带有一根电话线一样。未来和你们手中的工作息息相关。”之后，艾伯哈德感谢了几位核心工程师，赞扬了他们付出的努力。那时很多工程师都经常彻夜不眠地工作，因此艾伯哈德的演讲很能鼓舞士气。“我们都工作到让自己精疲力竭的程度，”特斯拉的前发言人戴维·威斯普瑞米^{(David Vespremi)}如是说道，“然后我们就迎来了这个时刻，他提醒了我们，造车并不是为了让公司上市或者把车卖给一些有钱人，而是因为我们的工作也许能改变汽车的本质。”

These victories, though, were not enough to overcome the feeling shared by many of the Tesla engineers that Eberhard had reached the end of his abilities as a CEO. The company veterans had always admired Eberhard's engineering smarts and continued to do so. Eberhard, in fact, had turned Tesla into a cult of engineering. Regrettably, other parts of the company had been neglected, and people doubted Eberhard's ability to take the company from the R&D stage to production. The ridiculous cost of the car, the transmission, the ineffective suppliers were crippling Tesla. And, as the company started to miss its delivery dates, many of the once-fanatical consumers who had made their large up-front payments turned on Tesla and Eberhard.

虽然艾伯哈德鼓舞了士气，却并不足以打消人们的顾虑，许多特斯拉工程师都有相同的感觉——艾伯哈德作为一名CEO已经江郎才尽了。公司元老一直很欣赏艾伯哈德作为一名工程师的才能，现在依然是这样。事实上，艾伯哈德将特斯拉变成了一个狂热崇拜工程师精神的团体。可惜的是，公司的其他方面似乎被忽略了。人们会质疑艾伯哈德是否有能力将公司从研发阶段带进生产阶段。汽车难以置信的成本、变速系统的问题，以及不作为的供应商，这些事情都严重影响了公司运作。随着特斯拉开始拖延发货日期，之前那些疯狂的、已经支付了大额预付款项的客户们，开始找上特斯拉和艾伯哈德了。

“We saw the writing on the wall,” Lyons said. “Everyone knew that the person who starts a company is not necessarily the right person to lead it in the long term, but whenever that is the case, it's not easy.”

“我们看到墙上写的字了。”莱恩斯说。每个人都知道，公司的创始人或许并不是那个适合领导公司长期发展的人，但不论什么时候发生这样的情况，都不是一件简单的事。

Eberhard and Musk had battled for years over some of the design points on the car. But for the most part, they had gotten along well enough. Neither man suffered fools. And they certainly shared many of the same visions for the battery technology and what it could mean to the world. What their relationship could not survive were the cost figures for the Roadster unearthed by Watkins. It looked to Musk as if Eberhard had grossly mismanaged the company by allowing the parts costs to soar so high. Then, as Musk saw it, Eberhard failed to disclose the severity of the situation to the board. While on his way to give a talk to the Motor Press Guild in Los Angeles, Eberhard received a call from Musk and in a brief, uncomfortable chat learned that he would be replaced as CEO.

艾伯哈德和马斯克在一些设计细节上已经争论了数年。但在大部分情况下他们还是相处得不错，两人都无法忍受笨蛋，而且他们对于电池技术以及电池技术对于世界的意义有着许多共同的愿景。当沃特金斯揭露了Roadster的真实成本时，艾伯哈德和马斯克之间的关系便破裂了。马斯克认为，艾伯哈德在管理公司方面出现了严重的失误，竟然允许成本飙升到如此之高。而且在马斯克看来，艾伯哈德还试图对董事会隐瞒事态的严重性，这基本上是在欺骗公司。在去洛杉矶汽车新闻公会^{(Motor Press Guild)}发表演说的路上，艾伯哈德接到了马斯克打来的电话，经过几番简短的、极其尴尬的沟通之后，艾伯哈德得知自己CEO的位子将被撤换。

In August 2007, Tesla's board demoted Eberhard and named him president of technology, which only exacerbated the company's issues. “Martin was so bitter and disruptive,” Straubel said. “I remember him running around the office and sowing discontent, as we're trying to finish the car and are running out of money and everything is at knife's edge.” As Eberhard saw it, other people at Tesla had foisted a wonky finance software application on him that made it tricky to accurately track costs. He contended that the delays and cost increases were partly due to the requests of other members of the management team and that he'd been up front with the board about the issues. Beyond that, he thought Watkins had made the situation out to be worse than it really was. Start-ups in Silicon Valley view mayhem as standard operating procedure. “Valor was used to dealing with older companies,” Eberhard said. “They found chaos and weren't used to it. This was the chaos of a start-up.” Eberhard had also already been asking Tesla's board to replace him as CEO and find someone with more manufacturing experience.

2007年8月，艾伯哈德被降职为技术总裁，但这只让事态变得更为恶化。“马丁对这个决定感到愤愤不平，并到处捣乱，”斯特劳贝尔说，“我记得他在公司四处煽动大家的不满情绪。那时我们正在试图马上结束汽车研发工作，资金也要用完了，一切都被逼到了悬崖边上。”但在艾伯哈德眼里，特斯拉的其他人试图把一个不靠谱儿的记账软件强加给了他，把追踪成本这项工作复杂化了。此外，他觉得真实情况没有沃特金斯说得那么糟糕。硅谷的创业公司把乱糟糟的氛围视作正常的公司运营过程。“维拉习惯于和传统行业的公司打交道，”艾伯哈德说，“他们看到混乱的场景并因此感到不适应。这种混乱就是创业公司一定会存在的那种混乱。”除了这些，艾伯哈德此前已经要求特斯拉董事会去找一个在生产制造方面经验更丰富的人来取代他担任CEO。

A few months passed, and Eberhard remained pissed-off. Many of the Tesla employees felt like they were caught in the middle of a divorce and had to pick their parent—Eberhard or Musk. By the time December arrived, the situation was untenable, and Eberhard left the company altogether. Tesla said in a statement that Eberhard had been offered a position on its advisory board, although he denied that. “I am no longer with Tesla Motors—neither on its board of directors nor an employee of any sort,” Eberhard said in a statement at the time. “I'm not happy with the way I was treated.”

几个月过去了，艾伯哈德仍然很生气。许多特斯拉员工觉得他们仿佛是面对家长正在商议离婚的孩子，不得不选择跟爸爸还是妈妈——站在艾伯哈德一边，还是站在马斯克一边。当12月到来的时候，事态已经到了不可挽回的地步，艾伯哈德于是彻底离开了特斯拉。特斯拉公司在一份声明中指出，将在顾问委员会给艾伯哈德提供一个职位，但是他拒绝了。“我与特斯拉汽车公司不再有任何关系了——无论是董事会也好还是任何形式的其他职位也好，”艾伯哈德在当时的一份声明中说，“我不满意我所受到的待遇。”

Musk sent a note to a Silicon Valley newspaper saying, “I'm sorry that it came to this and wish it were not so. It was not a question of personality differences, as the decision to have Martin transition to an advisory role was unanimous among the board. Tesla has operational problems that need to be solved and if the board thought there was any way that Martin could be part of the solution, then he would still be an employee of the company.”⁹

马斯克给硅谷的一份报纸写信说，“我很抱歉，事情发展到了这一步，我极不愿意看到这一幕。这与我们两人之间性格差异无关，因为马丁调任顾问的角色是董事会一致决定的。特斯拉有许多公司运营方面的问题需要解决，如果董事会认为马丁能够在某些解决方案中发挥作用，那么他现在仍然会是公司的一名员工。”⁹

As 2007 played out, the problems mounted for Tesla. The carbon-fiber body that looked so good turned out to be a huge pain to paint, and Tesla had to cycle through a couple of companies to find one that could do the work well. Sometimes there were faults in the battery pack. The motor short-circuited now and again. The body panels had visible gaps. The company also had to face up to the reality that a two-speed transmission was not going to happen. In order for the Roadster to achieve its flashy zero-to-60 times with a single-speed transmission, Tesla's engineers had to redesign the car's motor and inverter and shave off some weight. “We essentially had to do a complete reboot,” Musk said. “That was terrible.”

从2007年开始，特斯拉就一直面临着各种问题。碳纤维的车身表面上看起来很好，但是在上面喷漆很困难。特斯拉不得不循环往复于几家候选公司之间，以便找到一家能很好地完成这项任务的公司。电池组有时会出现故障。电动机时不时地会短路。车身面板之间有肉眼可见的间隙。公司还不得不面对这样一个现实——双速变速系统的方案是不可行的。为了使Roadster以单速变速系统实现迅速从起步加速至时速60英里的效果，特斯拉的工程师们不得不重新设计汽车的发动机和变频器，并减轻一些重量。“我们基本上是重新设计了整个系统，”马斯克说，“这太糟糕了。”

After Eberhard was removed as CEO, Tesla's board tapped Michael Marks as its interim chief. Marks had run Flextronics, an enormous electronics supplier, and had deep experience with complex manufacturing operations and logistics issues. Marks began interrogating various groups at the company to try to figure out their problems and to prioritize the issues plaguing the Roadster. He also put in some basic rules like making sure that people all showed up at work at the same time to establish a baseline of productivity—a tricky ask in Silicon Valley's work anywhere, anytime culture. All of these moves were part of the Marks List, a 10-point, 100-day plan that included eliminating all faults in the battery packs, getting gaps between body parts to less than 40 mm, and booking a specified number of reservations. “Martin had been falling apart and lacked a lot of the discipline key for a manager,” Straubel said. “Michael came in and evaluated the mess and was a bullshit filter. He didn't really have a dog in the fight and could say, ‘I don't care what you think or what you think. This is what we should do.'” For a while, Marks's strategy worked, and the engineers at Tesla could once again focus on building the Roadster rather than on internal politics. But then Marks's vision for the company began to diverge from Musk's.

艾伯哈德被撤销CEO的职位后，特斯拉的董事会任命迈克尔·马克斯^{(Michael Marks)}为公司临时首席执行官。马克斯曾经担任过大型电子产品供应商伟创力^{(Flextronics)}的首席执行官，在处理复杂的制造业务和物流问题方面拥有丰富经验。马克斯开始询问公司内部的人员，试图找出他们的问题，并在困扰着Roadster的问题中找出哪些是最需要优先解决的。他还制定了一些基本的规章制度，以确保生产力，比如说让每个员工在同一个时间出现在办公室——在硅谷随时随地工作的文化氛围中，这是一件非常棘手的事情。所有这些举措都列在马克斯的待办事项清单里。这是一个包含10项举措、期限为100天的计划，包括解决电池组的所有故障，让车身各部件之间的间隙小于40毫米，以及提前预订相关的配套服务。“马丁太没有条理了，缺乏成为一个经理所必需的纪律性，”斯特劳贝尔说，“现在迈克尔来了，分析了一下现状，然后把所有没用的废话都过滤掉了。他并没有加入这场混战，而且说出这样的话，‘我不在乎你到底怎么想。这就是我们应该做的。’”一段时间后，马克斯的策略起了效果。团队的工程师们能够再一次专注于制造Roadster，而不是被办公室政治所干扰。但后来马克斯在公司的愿景方面开始和马斯克产生了分歧。

By this time, Tesla had moved into a larger facility at 1050 Bing Street in San Carlos. The bigger building allowed Tesla to bring the battery work back in-house from Asia and for it to do some of the Roadster manufacturing, alleviating the supply chain issues. Tesla was maturing as a car company, although its wild-child start-up streak remained well intact. While strolling around the factory one day, Marks saw a Smart car from Daimler on a lift. Musk and Straubel had a small side project going on around the Smart car to see what it might be like as an electric vehicle.

到了这个时候，特斯拉已经搬进了位于圣卡洛斯冰大道^{(Bing Street)}1050号的一个更大的工厂里。这样他们就能有更大的空间可以将电池业务从亚洲搬回总部，同时也能从事一些Roadster的生产工作，并因此缓解了供应链上的问题。特斯拉作为一个汽车公司正在慢慢成熟起来，尽管其野孩子一般的创业公司内核依然没有改变。有一天，马克斯看到升降机上有一辆戴姆勒Smart轿车。马斯克和斯特劳贝尔有一个关于Smart的编外小项目，想看看它变成一辆电动汽车时会是什么样子的。

“Michael didn't know about it, and he's like, ‘Who is the CEO here?'” said Lyons. (The work on the Smart car eventually led to Daimler buying a 10 percent stake in Tesla.)

“迈克尔并不知道这件事，他当时的反应是，‘谁才是这里的CEO？’”莱恩斯说。^{(这项Smart计划最终促使戴姆勒购买了特斯拉10%的股份。)}

Marks's inclination was to try to package Tesla as an asset that could be sold to a larger car company. It was a perfectly reasonable plan. While running Flextronics, Marks had overseen a vast, global supply chain and knew the difficulties of manufacturing intimately. Tesla must have looked borderline hopeless to him at this point. The company could not make its one product well, was poised to hemorrhage money, and had missed a string of delivery deadlines and yet its engineers were still off doing side experiments. Making Tesla look as pretty as possible for a suitor was the rational thing to do.

马克斯试图将特斯拉打包成一个资产实体，这样就可以将它出售给大型汽车公司。这是一个完全合理的计划。在运营伟创力的时候，马克斯曾负责监管一个庞大的全球供应链，深知制造业困难重重。基于这一点，在他看来，特斯拉一定处于崩溃的边缘。这家公司甚至无法做好他们唯一的产品，资金随时会大量流失，并且已经错过了一系列的交货期限。而特斯拉的工程师们竟然还在做一些无关的实验。最理性的做法就是，尽可能让特斯拉看起来还不错，帮它找一个好的买家。

In just about every other case, Marks would be thanked for his decisive plan of action and saving the company's investors from a big loss. But Musk had little interest in polishing up Tesla's assets for the highest bidder. He'd started the company to put a dent in the automotive industry and force people to rethink electric cars. Instead of doing the fashionable Silicon Valley thing of “pivoting” toward a new idea or plan, Musk would dig in deeper. “The product was late and over budget and everything was wrong, but Elon didn't want anything to do with those plans to either sell the whole company or lose control through a partnership,” Straubel said. “So, Elon decided to double down.”

在通常情况下，马克斯的行事计划坚决果断，令公司的投资者人免于遭受重大损失，公司理应对这些做法表示感谢。但马斯克对于把特斯拉的资产装扮一番后待价而沽并无兴趣。他创立公司的初衷是，引起汽车行业的关注，迫使人们重新审视电动汽车。硅谷的行事风格是提出一个想法并证明想法可行，但马斯克并未止步于此，他想要做得更多。“我们的产品错过了指定的交货期限，而且还大大超出了预算。一切都不对，但是埃隆从未想过卖掉整个公司，也不想通过与其他公司合作而失去公司的部分控制权，”斯特劳贝尔说，“所以，埃隆最终决定加大赌注。”

On December 3, 2007, Ze'ev Drori replaced Marks as CEO. Drori had experience in Silicon Valley starting a company that made computer memory and selling it to the chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices. Drori was not Musk's first pick—a top choice had turned down the job because he didn't want to move from the East Coast—and did not inspire much enthusiasm from the Tesla employees. Drori had about fifteen years on the youngest Tesla worker and no connection to this group bonded by suffering and toil. He came to be seen more as an executor of Musk's wishes than as a commanding, independent CEO.

2007年12月3日，吉夫·德罗里^(Ze'evDrori)取代马克斯出任特斯拉CEO。德罗里曾在硅谷创办了生产电脑内存的公司，之后将公司出售给芯片制造商超微半导体公司^{(Adranced Micrp Devices，简称AMD)}。德罗里其实并不是马斯克心目中的第一人选——那位第一人选已经拒绝了这份工作，仅仅因为他不想从东海岸搬过来。但德罗里并没有激起特斯拉员工们的工作热情。德罗里比最年轻的特斯拉工程师要年长15岁，并且他和这些共患难的伙伴们没有任何交集。他看上去就像是一个傀儡CEO。

Musk began making more public gestures to mitigate the bad press around Tesla. He issued statements and did interviews, promising that the Roadster would ship to customers in early 2008. He began talking up a car code-named WhiteStar—the Roadster had been code-named DarkStar—that would be a sedan possibly priced around $50,000, and a new factory to build the machine. “Given the recent management changes, some reassurances are in order regarding Tesla Motors' future plans,” Musk wrote in a blog post. “The near term message is simple and unequivocal—we are going to deliver a great sports car next year that customers will love driving. . . . My car, production VIN 1, is already off the production line in the UK and final preparations are being made for importation.” Tesla held a series of town hall meetings with customers where it tried to fess up to its problems in the open, and it started building some showrooms for its car. Vince Sollitto, the former PayPal executive, visited the Menlo Park showroom and found Musk complaining about the public relations issues but clearly inspired by the product Tesla was building. “His demeanor changed the moment we got to this display of the motor,” Sollitto said. Dressed in a leather jacket and slacks, Musk started talking about the motor's properties and then put on a performance worthy of a carnival strongman by lifting the hundred-or-so-pound hunk of metal. “He picks this thing up and wedges it between his two palms,” Sollitto said. “He's holding it, and he's shaking and beads of sweat are forming on his forehead. It wasn't so much a display of strength as a physical demonstration of the beauty of the product.” While the customers complained a lot about the delays, they seemed to sense this passion from Musk and share his enthusiasm for the product. Only a handful of customers asked for their prepayments back.

马斯克开始增加他的曝光率，试图平息媒体对特斯拉的各种负面报道。他发表声明，接受采访，并向客户承诺Roadster将会在2008年年初交货。他开始畅谈一辆代号为“白星”的汽车——Roadster的代号为“暗星”——这是一辆售价约为5万美元的房车。特斯拉还会有新的工厂用于生产这些汽车。“鉴于近期管理层有些变动，我们需要给人们吃一颗定心丸，让大家对我们未来的计划有信心，”马斯克在一篇博客文章中这样写道，“我们短期内的目标是简单而明确的——明年我们会把一辆超赞的跑车交到客户手中，他们会爱上它的。我们VIN 1批次的产品已经从英国的生产线上下来，正在为进口做的准备。”特斯拉在市政大厅举行了一系列的见面会，试图将它存在的问题公之于众，并同时着手为这部电动汽车建造展示厅。前PayPal高管文斯·苏里图^{(Vince Sollitto)}参观了位于门洛帕克的展厅。他发现马斯克虽然对公关问题颇有微词，但对特斯拉正在制造的产品似乎非常有信心。苏里图说，“当我们走进发动机展厅的时候，他整个人的神态都变了。”马斯克穿着皮夹克、休闲裤和皮鞋，开始谈论发动机的一些性能，然后将这个重达100磅的发动机举了起来，足以媲美狂欢节上大力士的表演。“他把那东西举了起来，两只手牢牢抓住，”苏里图说，“他抱着发动机，整个人都在颤抖，额头上冒出了汗珠。这与其说是展示他个人的力量，更不如说是以肉体展现他们的产品之美。”虽然客户对于特斯拉错过发货期抱怨颇多，但他们似乎感受到马斯克对于产品的热情，这种热情也传递给了他们。最终只有极少数几位客户要回了他们的预付款。

Tesla employees soon got to witness the same Musk that SpaceX employees had seen for years. When an issue like the Roadster's faulty carbon-fiber body panels cropped up, Musk dealt with it directly. He flew to England in his jet to pick up some new manufacturing tools for the body panels and personally delivered them to a factory in France to ensure that the Roadster stayed on its production schedule. The days of people being ambiguous about the Roadster's manufacturing costs were gone as well. “Elon got fired up and said we were going to do this intense cost-down program,” said Popple. “He gave a speech, saying we would work on Saturdays and Sundays and sleep under desks until it got done. Someone pushed back from the table and argued that everyone had been working so hard just to get the car done, and they were ready for a break and to see their families. Elon said, ‘I would tell those people they will get to see their families a lot when we go bankrupt.' I was like, ‘Wow,' but I got it. I had come out of a military culture, and you just have to make your objective happen.” Employees were required to meet at 7 A.M. every Thursday morning for bill-of-materials updates. They had to know the price of every part and have a cogent plan for getting parts cheaper. If the motor cost $6,500 a pop at the end of December, Musk wanted it to cost $3,800 by April. The costs were plotted and analyzed each month. “If you started falling behind, there was hell to pay,” Popple said. “Everyone could see it, and people lost their jobs when they didn't deliver. Elon has a mind that's a bit like a calculator. If you put a number on the projector that does not make sense, he will spot it. He doesn't miss details.” Popple found Musk's style aggressive, but he liked that Musk would listen to a well-argued, analytical point and often change his mind if given a good enough reason. “Some people thought Elon was too tough or hot-tempered or tyrannical,” Popple said. “But these were hard times, and those of us close to the operational realities of the company knew it. I appreciated that he didn't sugarcoat things.”

特斯拉的员工很快就见识到了那个SpaceX公司员工早已习以为常的马斯克。当有突发事件的时候，比如Roadster的碳纤维车身出了问题，马斯克会亲自处理这件事。他会乘他的私人飞机去英国搜集一些用于车身面板的新原料，并亲自送到法国的工厂，以确保不会影响Roadster的生产进度。Roadster的成本模棱两可的日子也过去了。“埃隆勃然大怒，说我们要完成这项迫切的成本削减计划，”波普说，“他发表了一场演讲，要求我们在周六和周日依然努力工作，并睡在桌子底下，直到这项计划完成。人群中有人表示反对，他们认为每个员工都为了这辆车工作得如此辛苦，他们也需要休息一下，可以有时间陪陪家人。埃隆说，‘我想告诉那些人，我们破产之后，他们会有更多的时间陪家人的。’我当时脑海里冒出来的就是，‘天啊’，但我知道马斯克是什么意思。我是从军队出来的，有时候，你必须让自己的目标成为现实。”他要求员工们在每周四早晨7点开会，审阅最新的原材料账单。他们必须要了解每个零件的价格，然后制订一个合理的计划让价格变得更便宜。如果一台发电机在12月底的时候价格为6 500美元，马斯克希望它的成本能在次年4月降到3 800美元。公司每个月都会对这些零件的成本进行分析和规划。“如果你掉队了，你将会为此付出惨重的代价，”波普说，“每个人都会看到的，如果你没有完成计划，你就会失业。埃隆的大脑就像一台计算器。哪怕投影仪上出现一个不合理的数字，他都会注意到。他不会错过任何细节。”波普发现马斯克的风格有些咄咄逼人，但很喜欢他的一个特点是，他会耐心听取有理有据、分析性很强的观点。而且，只要你的理由足够好，他会改变想法。“有些人认为埃隆过于强硬或暴躁，甚至像个暴君，”波普说，“但这都是因为我们处在最为艰难的时刻，熟知公司运营现实的人对这些再清楚不过了。我很欣赏他不会掩盖事实这一点。”

On the marketing front, Musk would run daily Google searches for news stories about Tesla. If he saw a bad story, he ordered someone to “fix it” even though the Tesla public relations people could do little to sway the reporters. One employee missed an event to witness the birth of his child. Musk fired off an e-mail saying, “That is no excuse. I am extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We're changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don't.”*

在营销方面，马斯克每天都会在谷歌上搜索有关特斯拉的新闻。如果他看到了负面消息，即便特斯拉的公关人员没有办法让记者改变他们的观点，他也会指定一个人去“更正它”。有一个员工因为孩子出生而错过了一场活动。马斯克马上发来一封连珠炮似的邮件：“这不是借口。我感到非常失望。你需要弄清楚，什么对你来说更重要。我们正在改变世界、改变历史，如果你不打算全力以赴，那你就别干了。”^[3]

Marketing people who made grammatical mistakes in e-mails were let go, as were other people who hadn't done anything “awesome” in recent memory. “He can be incredibly intimidating at times but doesn't have a real sense for just how imposing he can be,” said one former Tesla executive. “We'd have these meetings and take bets on who was going to get bloodied and bruised. If you told him that you made a particular choice because ‘it was the standard way things had always been done,' he'd kick you out of a meeting fast. He'd say, ‘I never want to hear that phrase again. What we have to do is fucking hard and half-assing things won't be tolerated.' He just destroys you and, if you survive, he determines if he can trust you. He has to understand that you're as crazy as he is.” This ethos filtered through the entire company, and everyone quickly understood that Musk meant business.

那些在电子邮件里犯语法错误的营销人员会被要求直接走人，同样的，如果最近没有做出令人称道的成绩也得走人。“他有时候会咄咄逼人，但其实他并不知道自己有多可怕，”一位特斯拉的前高管如是说道，“我们经常会在开会时打赌谁会被骂。如果你告诉他，你做出某个选择是因为‘之前一直都是这样做的’，他会马上把你从会议室踢出去，并说‘我再也不想听到这句话。我们要全力以赴，决不允许三心二意’。他会不断挑战你，如果你能经受住考验，他就会决定是否可以信任你。他必须知道你和他一样疯狂。公司上下都理解他的这种价值取向，而且大家马上就意识到马斯克是认真的。”

Straubel, while sometimes on the bad end of the critiques, welcomed Musk's hard-charging presence. The five years to get to this point had been an enjoyable slog for him. Straubel had transformed from a quiet, capable engineer who shuffled around Tesla's factory floor with his head down into the most crucial member of the technical team. He knew more about the batteries and the electric drivetrain than just about anyone else at the company. He also began developing a role as a go-between for employees and Musk. Straubel's engineering smarts and work ethic had earned Musk's respect, and Straubel found that he could deliver difficult messages to Musk on behalf of other employees. As he would do for years to come, Straubel also proved willing to check his ego at the door. All that mattered was getting the Roadster and the follow-on sedan to market to popularize electric cars, and Musk looked like the best person to make that happen.

斯特劳贝尔尽管有时候也会批评马斯克，但对马斯克雷厉风行的姿态还是很欣赏的。在这5年时间里，斯特劳贝尔还是很愉快的。他已经从当年那个安静的、低着头穿梭于工厂的年轻工程师变成了公司技术团队的核心成员。他对于电池和电动变速系统的了解，比公司其他任何人都多。他也成了员工和马斯克之间沟通的桥梁。斯特劳贝尔的工程智慧和职业道德赢得了马斯克的尊重，而且他发现，他可以替员工们将一些棘手的信息传达给马斯克。同时，就像他在未来的几年一直在做的那样，斯特劳贝尔也愿意在马斯克走出办公室的时候提醒他收敛一下自己的戾气。目前最重要的事情，是将Roadster和后续的房车推向市场，将电动汽车普及，而马斯克看起来像是实现这一目标的最佳人选。

Other employees had enjoyed the thrill of the engineering challenge over the past five years but were burnt-out beyond repair. Wright didn't believe that an electric car for the masses would ever take off. He left and started his own company dedicated to making electric versions of delivery trucks. Berdichevsky had been a crucial, do-anything young engineer for much of Tesla's existence. Now that the company employed about three hundred people, he felt less effective and didn't relish the idea of suffering for another five years to bring the sedan to market. He would leave Tesla, get a couple of degrees from Stanford, and cofound a start-up looking to make a revolutionary new battery that could soon go into electric cars. With Eberhard gone, Tarpenning found Tesla less fun. He didn't see eye to eye with Drori and also shied away from the idea of frying his soul to get the sedan out. Lyons stuck around longer, which is a minor miracle. At various points, he had led the development of most of the core technology behind the Roadster, including the battery packs, the motor, the power electronics, and, yes, the transmission. This meant that for about five years Lyons had been among Tesla's most capable employees and the guy constantly in the doghouse for being behind on something and thus holding the rest of the company up. He suffered through some of Musk's more colorful tirades—directed either at him or suppliers that had let Tesla down—that included talk of people's balls being chopped off and other violent or sexual acts. Lyons also saw an exhausted, stressed-out Musk spit coffee across a conference room table because it was cold and then, without a pause, demand that the employees work harder, do more, and mess up less. Like so many people privy to these performances, Lyons came away with no illusions about Musk's personality but with the utmost respect for his vision and drive to execute. “Working at Tesla back then was like being Kurtz in Apocalypse Now,” Lyons said. “Don't worry about the methods or if they're unsound. Just get the job done. It comes from Elon. He listens, asks good questions, is fast on his feet, and gets to the bottom of things.”

其他员工虽然很享受过去5年里种种工程挑战带来的快感，但是他们的身心已经严重透支了。莱特认为面向大众的电动汽车不会普及，于是他离开了，并创立了自己的公司，致力于制造电动卡车。而博迪切夫斯基原本是特斯拉一位重要的全能型年轻工程师，现在公司已经雇用了大约300人，他觉得自己发挥的作用已经没那么重要了，而且也不想再受5年的苦，等待新车上市。他之后离开了特斯拉，在斯坦福大学获得了几个学位，然后成为一家初创公司的联合创始人，致力于生产能够用于电动车的具有革命性的新电池。随着艾伯哈德的离开，塔彭宁觉得特斯拉不像以前那么有趣了。他和德罗里意见不统一，也不希望自己为了那辆轿车再受煎熬。莱恩斯待的时间稍长一些，这是一个小小的奇迹。在不同的时期，他牵头开发了Roadster背后大部分核心技术，包括电池组、发动机、动力电子元件，还有变速系统。这意味着，在5年时间里，莱恩斯一直是特斯拉最能干的员工之一，同时也是那个经常因为某项业务进度落后，导致其他业务进度而备受冷落的人。他曾忍受马斯克脏话连篇——要么是针对他本人，要么是针对那些让特斯拉失望的供应商们。责骂的内容包括要把某些人的睾丸切掉，还有其他具有侵犯性的过激行为。他还见过精疲力竭、承受着极大压力的马斯克将咖啡吐在了会议室的桌子上，因为咖啡是冷的，然后马上要求员工更加努力地工作，做更多的事情，犯更少的错误。和其他了解这些事情的人一样，他因无法忍受马斯克的性格而选择离开，但是他极其敬佩马斯克的眼界和极强的执行力。“那时在特斯拉工作，就像身处电影《现代启示录》里的库尔兹上校统治的王国一样，”莱恩斯说，“别担心那些方法，也别担心这些做法是否可行，你只需要完成你的工作就好。这番话出自埃隆之口。他愿意倾听，提出问题，并迅速付诸行动，然后就能了解事实的真相。”

Tesla could survive the loss of some of these early hires. Its strong brand had allowed the company to keep recruiting top talent, including people from large automotive companies who knew how to get over the last set of challenges blocking the Roadster from reaching customers. But Tesla's major issue no longer revolved around effort, engineering, or clever marketing. Heading into 2008, the company was running out of money. The Roadster had cost about $140 million to develop, way over the $25 million originally estimated in the 2004 business plan. Under normal circumstances, Tesla had probably done enough to raise more funds. These, however, were not normal times. The big automakers in the United States were charging toward bankruptcy in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. In the midst of all this, Musk needed to convince Tesla's investors to fork over tens of millions of additional dollars, and those investors had to go to their constituents to lay out why this made any sense. As Musk put it, “Try to imagine explaining that you're investing in an electric car company, and everything you read about the car company sounds like it is shit and doomed and it's a recession and no one is buying cars.” All Musk had to do to dig Tesla out of this conundrum was lose his entire fortune and verge on a nervous breakdown.

特斯拉能够经受住一些早期员工的流失。其强大的品牌效应足以让公司持续吸引并招募顶尖人才，包括来自于传统大型汽车企业的人才，他们知道如何应对将Roadster交付到客户手中之前所面临的终极挑战。但特斯拉的主要问题已经不再是努力、工程技术或聪明的营销策略了。进入2008年，公司的钱用完了。Roadster的研发成本耗资约1.4亿美元，远远超过2004年商业计划书中估计的2 500万美元。在正常情况下，特斯拉所做的一切已经足够让他们筹集到更多的资金了。然而，2008年绝非寻常时期。美国的大型汽车制造商们在这场自大萧条以来最严重的金融危机中濒临破产。在这些不利的条件下，马斯克需要说服特斯拉的投资者再额外投资千万美元，而这些投资公司也不得不向股东们解释为什么这么做是有意义的。正如马斯克所说，“试着想象一下，你打算投资一家电动汽车公司，但你所了解的有关这家汽车公司的一切听起来都糟糕无比。而且，现在处于经济衰退期，没有人愿意购买汽车。”现在，马斯克如果想要将特斯拉从这个两难的泥沼中解救出来，他只能冒着失去全部财产，并让自己濒临精神崩溃的风险。

^[1]火人节始于1986年，其基本宗旨是提倡社区观念、包容、创造性、时尚以及反消费主义。火人节是由美国一个名为“Black Rock City， LLC”的组织发起的反传统狂欢节。——编者注

^[2]在一次融资之后媒体发布的报告中，马斯克并未被列入特斯拉创始人的名单。在“关于特斯拉汽车公司”的栏目下，写着“特斯拉汽车是在2003年6月由马丁·艾伯哈德和马克·塔彭宁创立的，旨在为热爱驾驶的人们制造效率更高的电动汽车”。马斯克和艾伯哈德最终将会因马斯克的创始人身份而陷入争吵。

^[3]他后来告诉这名员工，“我要你考虑到超前的事情，我要你能够用力地思考，每一天都思考到头疼。我希望你每天晚上睡觉的时候头都会疼。”