The Tesla Roadster Tricked Enthusiasts Into Loving EVs — Jason Cammisa Revelations Ep. 30

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roadster

, a Lotus Elise with a bunch of double A batteries, don't be ridiculous, they're not Double A, they're 18,650, and besides, no matter what you've read on the Internet, this is not just an electric Lotus Elise, In fact, the Tesla Roadster shares with the Elise a tenth of the parts that jeans share with Elon Musk and all of you, with one possible exception, are not Elon Musk because if you were Elon Musk you would know that this thing could have been worth 35 million dollars, explanation: well, if the person who paid a hundred thousand dollars for a Tesla Roadster had bought a hundred thousand dollars in Tesla stock, it would have been worth more than 35 million dollars by the time the car was 11 years old, so this Not only was it not an electric Lotus Elise, but it was also the world's worst investment in simultaneously the start-up capital to create the most valuable automaker in the history of the world and it did so by fooling the coolest people in the world, the car

enthusiasts

, making them believe that an electric car wasn't a slow, miserable joke because, for the first time in history, an electric car wasn't a slow, miserable joke.

Love or hate electric vehicles. Love or hate Elon Musk. The Tesla Roadster was an incredibly well thought out ruse designed to trick the coolest people in the world, the car

enthusiasts

, into allowing the idea of ​​change and this whole story begins in Michigan with a home built motorcycle engine kit by a Ford engineer. This was the Pion Tech sport Tech in 1989, its creator Dave Pion Tech made the first one. one in his garage took him 2,000 hours and cost him fifteen thousand dollars and used a welded steel tube frame to assemble a 1,300 cc, twin cam, 16-valve, four-cylinder Suzuki with 5-speed manual transmission, 150 horsepower more nitrous and only 1,234 lbs. to move, it hit 60 miles per hour in just four and a half seconds, exactly as fast as the world beating the giant Corvette ZR1, which had not yet entered production.

Pintek eventually ended up building six sports technicians, one of which was purchased by a young man. A Southern California company called AC Propulsion AC Propulsion's mission was to advance the art of the electric automobile - in other words, to convince people that electric cars deserve slow, miserable batteries with barely enough range to complete a marathon, which is exactly what they were. -founded by one of the engineers who had worked on GM's impact, the incredible show car that eventually became the ev1 AC. The first ev1 AC car was called t0, named after the mathematical symbol T Sub Zero or at first, the t0 was a Pion Tech sport Tech. converted to run on electricity and used 28 Optima Yellow lead-acid batteries.

This thing, look, it was January 1997 and the only other electric car you could buy, you couldn't buy it, you could lease it, but it was that same GM ev1 that had gone on sale just a month before and also ran on lead batteries- acid, and to get a perspective on how revolutionary the ev1 was, GM also leased another electric car, a Chevy S10 pickup truck converted to front-wheel drive with an EPA-rated range of 33 miles walking. distance, that's why the GM ev1 was so revolutionary it could go 79 miles on a charge and the t0 could do 90. That was a huge achievement, this was their absolutely high tech when the EVS came along, the t0 was so fast too How did they arrive.

It hit 60 in 4.1 seconds. This is important. It was faster than 10,000 RPM. The nitrous-injected Pion Tech AC drive screamed, putting 63,000 miles on the t0 and getting noticed by a bunch of nerds in the process. No, no, Elon, it's still not good, bear with me. because this sounds like a neighborhood comedy The president of AC Propulsions had a neighbor who drove an electric Toyota RAV4. This was another one of those 1997 appearances of the Elise's only electric vehicle. Anyway, the neighbor who drove the RAV4 worked with a nerd named Martin Everhart, who was an IT and electrical guy. engineer who had made some money and wanted to drive a sports car but didn't like the idea of ​​destroying the planet remembers his name Martin Everhart because he is a key player anyway the RAV4 guy introduces Eberhart to the AC propulsion guy to that can test a t-0 and Everhart wanted one, but Everhart wanted it to be even better, so he used his big brain to help AC propulsion convert the t0 to run on lithium-ion batteries, which are two Steps above those old lead-acid batteries, the next step. and the hottest fad in battery technology at the time was nickel metal hydride.

The RAV4 used those custom lithium-ion batteries that were much more expensive by comparison, to the point that they weren't even considered for use in cars, except this was the Big Bang. When the electric car suddenly became feasible instead of expensive custom Prismatic batteries, Eberhard came up with the idea of ​​using inexpensive, mass-produced, small-format cylindrical batteries, like the ones you'd find in your computer. portable 18650s for Be precise, 18 millimeters wide, 65.0 millimeters long, a little larger than a double A, put a bunch of these cells in a liquid-cooled case and you have a large, reliable and economical car battery .

The t0 used 6,000 of those 18650s and still ended up weighing 500 pounds less than the previous version with the 28 yellow caps and became even faster 0-60 was now an unheard of 3.7 seconds, but the real game changer occurred in the range that went from 90 miles to 300. Oh, ladies and gentlemen, we have takeoff. especially since the 6800 lithium 18650s cost less than even those fancy nickel metal hydride batteries in the RAV4 and packed twice as much power. Everhart took that T0 back to Northern California and drove it for three months as his diary while trying to convince the AC. propulsion guys to put it into regular production and they said no, they were working on an electric conversion of the Scion XP called e-box that would be the way to save the planet, they thought that an electric commuter car has much more savings for the Earth . more potential than a low volume sports car, good bad, have you ever seen an electronic box?

One thing Tom Hanks bought into though is that the Nerds really needed something sexy to convince the world that EVS could work, so Everhart came up with the name and Incorporated. The guiding principles of the Tesla Inc company were to make electric vehicles that were not compromised; in fact, they should be even better than their internal combustion counterparts and had to appeal to even the most die-hard car enthusiasts, like you, you finished me off and now you finally can. enters Elon Musk with his McLaren F1 full of cash from the PayPal sale Elon also tested a t-0 and also wanted to buy one and also tried to convince AC Propulsion to market it and once again they just pointed towards his e-box but they did one thing very well: Elon Musk was introduced to Martin Everhart, this was where the rubber really hit the road, although eberhardt had already been talking to Lotus about building a lightweight chassis, after all, Lotus had the patent on Bonded and extruded aluminum chassis. designing the little Elise was a great place to start, but it didn't end with the Elise, don't forget that Lotus was as much an engineering consultancy as it was a car manufacturer and its little black book of customers included everyone who gave Tesla access to suppliers who would otherwise never have answered your call bonjour thank you for calling Michelin Tires what is an Elon Musk that smells so bad?

You have to take care of it with Lysol, so Tesla worked together with Lotus to make huge, substantial changes to the Elise. chassis, although some of the engineering and manufacturing fundamentals were left in the details, in the end there was not much left Elise remains in the Roadster, its side sills are 1.6 inches lower so that humans can enter and exit and it has a distance two inches longer wheelbase than the elisa, both for better handling and more space for the battery, wipers, mirrors, steering column, front suspension, wishbones, roll cage and soft top , they may look a lot alike, especially from the waist up, but the Lotus Elise and the Tesla.

Roadsters share only seven percent of their parts to put it in perspective, two humans share 99.6 percent of their DNA. We like to think of ourselves as individual snowflakes. The styling was done by Barney Hatt at Lotus, the entire body was carbon fiber, even the glued-on front end. The crash structure was made of carbon, unlike the Elise and its cumbersome fiberglass clamshells, the Roadster had removable bumpers and fenders. The chassis was built along the same lines as the Elise and then put on a plane and airlifted to Menlo Park, California, where it was converted. In a complete Tesla, the missing piece was of course the powertrain, starting with 6,831 of those little laptop batteries that were worth a thousand pounds and were placed in a cabinet that was bolted together to become a structural member and make it The chassis of this thing was stronger than the Elise. those electrons flowed to a 248 horsepower motor via a Power Electronics module licensed for, you guessed it, AC propulsion, not that this is a later car and it's different to get a top speed close to 130 miles per hour and have incredibly fast acceleration.

The Roadster needed a two-speed transmission that was extract supplied and allowed the car to hit 60 miles per hour in about 4 seconds in first gear and then shift into second and explode immediately. The problem was that the transmission did not have a clutch. The concept was to achieve shifting using engine control, but the engine speed took too long to decrease and therefore absorbing the rotational inertia of a 13,000 RPM electric motor was well beyond the physical capabilities of the transmission. , unfortunately, so Tesla then switched to another one. This two-speed, built by Ricardo, which had two clutches, would also take the Roadster to 60 in first gear and then attempt a shift in 0.3 seconds.

Emphasis on the word bang because what would actually happen is the second gear clutch would explode. sending shrapnel through the gear set and boom stroke to get a two speed to work and ended up being won by Electronics. A new igbt or insulated gate bipolar transistor allowed enough current flow to achieve Tesla's 0-60 goal and top speed. Objective, without using multiple gears, the transmission became a simple single speed manufactured by Borg Warner, which simply proves that the old saying "third is a lovely crisis" was correctly avoided, no, because the big problem was that the procedure EPA test report had returned a range of 182 miles far less than the 250 mile range Tesla had been promising to all the people who invested a hundred thousand dollars in a yet-to-be-produced Roadster, this is where Tesla really set itself apart from everyone. traditional automakers on the planet, any of them would have simply kept their mouth shut covered everything and ended up in court.

Tesla overshared and sent a letter to all order holders saying, "Hey, you know we're not going to hit 250 miles, but we promise we'll at least hit 200." We don't even know how they would get to 200. We all know that Elon Musk has perhaps the worst under-promise and under-deliverer in the industry, except in those cases where he under-promises and then over-delivers. Conventional wisdom would solve both. He had trouble telling Elon to just shut up, but that seems like something he's incapable of doing, and he saved Tesla because when the Roadster reservation holders were getting really angry that it was months and months and months late, Elon opened up. and became a human being. being with them, he called the city council and told them that he admitted that designing a car was and I quote like eating disgusting and glass and then he continued not just a little bit of glass like eating a glass of bologna sandwich and then he personally promised to return the money to each and every reservation holder if Tesla couldn't deliver the Roadster and when asked if he could afford it he said ok if I can't then I will work for the rest of my life to pay them back, imagine a Ford executive saying something like Tesla overseas had a blog where they shared the engineering process with customers and shared the news every time they invented a way to get more range a couple more miles here with Brake Caliper Seals of recoil that separated the pads from the rotor surface, a couple more there with some tire pressure changes and a few more here by having the computer cool the battery when in moderange using mains power so the battery does not work.

He didn't have to use his own power to cool down. The engineering solutions were great, but the honesty was even greater by involving customers in the process, good and bad. Elon created an army of people who believed in his company because they could see that Tesla was really trying. and then of course Tesla delivered on all their promises anyway, the Roadster not only barely hit 200 miles of range, it was rated at 244 and was a revelation. I discovered this in 2009, when I was the first. person to convince Tesla to give a journalist a loan of the Roadster for several days.

I told the story to my editors at Automobile magazine as a way to prove that this Silicon Valley program knew nothing about how to build a car and I would prove that you would have to buy one of these things instead of a Lotus Elise that costs half, boy, was I wrong? I loved it and I remember saying that out loud to myself 500 feet away from leaving the Tesla factory doing a little burnout. through a couple lanes of traffic arriving at a red light right next to a police officer who hadn't even noticed me. The policeman doesn't listen to him.

You didn't do it over the course of five days. I ran at full speed. I went shopping. I put it on a dinosaur, tore up the back roads, bought my house there and during the final photo shoot I found out that Michael Jackson had died. It was an amazing week from my notes. This story was supposed to examine whether I could force myself to live with an electric vehicle for an entire week. Now I don't want to live without one. I was the biggest skeptic ever, and yet I'm a complete convert and an idiot. The interior was stunning, much nicer than any Lotus Elise, especially this latest Roadster with its gorgeous all-leather cabin.

I even love the noise those transmission gears made and that was by design, it was such a cool noise that the producers of the 2008 Dark Knight movie put a Tesla Roadster on a Dyno, tested its sound and used it as the basis for the batman batpom soundtrack. Everyone loved the Tesla Roadster except the bills, it sold for about a hundred thousand dollars, but the Tesla bill of materials was a hundred and forty thousand. dollars, meaning it was not only a bad investment compared to the hundred thousand dollars worth of Tesla stock I could have bought instead of one of these, but it was a waste of money for Tesla itself.

But ultimately what it did was show car enthusiasts that electric sports cars could be faster than combustion sports cars, which opened the door for the Model S, which showed car enthusiasts cars that an electric luxury sedan could be faster than a hypercar, which then showed the world that an electric car would be cool as long as it wasn't a golf cart with a license plate like it had been the electronics box. AC propulsion had the technology, but it was the enthusiasts at Eberhard and Elon who understood that the shift to electric vehicles couldn't happen quickly, but electric vehicles had to be fast. to make them cool and then once they were cool, normal people might want to drive them if you don't think an electric sports car is cool because you haven't driven a Tesla Roadster abroad.