Elon Musk
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A small team of Tesla engineers began the process of trying to figure out the mechanical inner workings of the Model S. Their first step in this journey took place at a Mercedes dealership where they test drove a CLS 4-Door Coupe and an E-Class sedan. The cars had the same chassis, and the Tesla engineers took measurements of every inch of the vehicles, studying what they liked and didn’t like. In the end, they preferred the styling on the CLS and settled on it as their baseline for thinking about the Model S.
After purchasing a CLS, Tesla’s engineers tore it apart. One team had reshaped the boxy, rectangular battery pack from the Roadster and made it flat. The engineers cut the floor out of the CLS and plopped in the pack. Next they put the electronics that tied the whole system together in the trunk. After that, they replaced the interior of the car to restore its fit and finish. Following three months of work, Tesla had in effect built an all-electric Mercedes CLS. Tesla used the car to woo investors and future partners like Daimler that would eventually turn to Tesla for electric powertrains in their vehicles. Now and again, the Tesla team took the car out for drives on public roads. It weighed more than the Roadster but was still fast and had a range of about 120 miles per charge. To perform these joyrides-cum-tests in relative secrecy, the engineers had to weld the tips of the exhaust pipes back onto the car to make it look like any other CLS.
It was at this time, the summer of 2008, when an artsy car lover named Franz von Holzhausen joined Tesla. His job would be to breathe new life into the car’s early designs and, if possible, turn the Model S into an iconic product.*
Von Holzhausen grew up in a small Connecticut town. His father worked on the design and marketing of consumer products, and Franz treated the family basement full of markers, different kinds of paper, and other materials as a playground for his imagination. As he grew older, von Holzhausen drifted toward cars. He and a friend stripped down a dune-buggy motor one winter and then built it back up, and von Holzhausen always filled the margins of his school notebooks with drawings of cars and had pictures of cars on his bedroom walls. Applying to college, von Holzhausen decided to follow his father’s path and enrolled in the industrial design program at Syracuse University. Then, through a chance encounter with another designer during an internship, von Holzhausen heard about the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. “This guy had been teaching me about car design and this school in Los Angeles, and I got super-intrigued,” said von Holzhausen. “I went to Syracuse for two years and then decided to transfer out to California.”
The move to Los Angeles kicked off a long and storied design career in the automotive industry. Von Holzhausen would go on to intern in Michigan with Ford and in Europe with Volkswagen, where he began to pick up on a mix of design sensibilities. After graduating in 1992, he started work for Volkswagen on just about the most exciting project imaginable—a top-secret new version of the Beetle. “It really was a magical time,” von Holzhausen said. “Only fifty people in the world knew we were doing this project.” Von Holzhausen had a chance to work on the exterior and interior of the vehicle, including the signature flower vase built into the dashboard. In 1997, Volkswagen launched the “New Beetle,” and von Holzhausen saw firsthand how the look of the car captivated the public and changed the way people felt about Volkswagen, which had suffered from woeful sales in the United States. “It started a rebirth of the VW brand and brought design back into their mix,” he said.
Von Holzhausen spent eight years with VW, climbing the ranks of its design team and falling in love with the car culture of Southern California. Los Angeles has long adored its cars, with the climate lending itself to all manner of vehicles from convertibles to surfboard-toting vans. Almost all of the major carmakers set up design studios in the city. The presence of the studios allowed von Holzhausen to hop from VW to General Motors and Mazda, where he served as the company’s director of design.
GM taught von Holzhausen just how nasty a big car company could become. None of the cars in GM’s lineup really excited him, and it seemed near impossible to make a large impact on the company’s culture. He was one member of a thousand-person design team that divvyed up the makes of cars haphazardly without any consideration as to which person really wanted to work on which car. “They took all the spirit out of me,” said von Holzhausen. “I knew I didn’t want to die there.” Mazda, by contrast, needed and wanted help. It let von Holzhausen and his team in Los Angeles put their imprint on every car in the North American vehicle lineup and to produce a set of concept cars that reshaped how the company approached design. As von Holzhausen put it, “We brought the zoom-zoom back into the look and feel of the car.”
Von Holzhausen started a project to make Mazda’s cars more green by revaluating the types of materials used to fabricate the seats and the fuels going into the vehicles. He had, in fact, just made an ethanol-based concept car when, in early 2008, a friend told him that Tesla needed a chief designer. After playing phone tag for a month with Musk’s assistant, Mary Beth Brown, to inquire about the position, von Holzhausen finally got in touch and met Musk for an interview at the SpaceX headquarters.
Musk instantly saw von Holzhausen, with his bouffant, trendy clothes and laid-back attitude, as a free-spirited, creative complement and wooed him with vigor. They took a tour of the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne and Tesla’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. Both facilities were chaotic and reeked of start-up. Musk ramped up the charm and sold von Holzhausen on the idea that he had a chance to shape the future of the automobile and that it made sense to leave his cushy job at a big, proven automaker for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “Elon and I went for a drive in the Roadster, and everyone was checking it out,” von Holzhausen said. “I knew I could stay at Mazda for ten years and get very comfortable or take a huge leap of faith. At Tesla, there was no history, no baggage. There was just a vision of products that could change the world. Who wouldn’t want to be involved with that?”
While von Holzhausen knew the risks of going to a startup, he could not have realized just how close Tesla was to bankruptcy when he joined the company in August 2008. Musk had coaxed von Holzhausen away from a secure job and into the jaws of death. But in many ways, this is what von Holzhausen sought at this point in his career. Tesla did not feel as much like a car company as a bunch of guys tinkering on a big idea. “To me, it was exciting,” he said. “It was like a garage experiment, and it made cars cool again.” The suits were gone, and so were the veteran automotive hands dulled by years working in the industry. In their stead, von Holzhausen found energetic geeks who didn’t realize that what they wanted to do was borderline impossible. Musk’s presence added to the energy and gave von Holzhausen confidence that Tesla actually could outflank much, much larger competitors. “Elon’s mind was always way beyond the present moment,” he said. “You could see that he was a step or three ahead of everyone else and one hundred percent committed to what we were doing.”
Von Holzhausen had examined the drawings of the Model S left by Fisker and a clay model of the car and had come away unimpressed. “It was a blob,” he said. “It was clear to me that the people that had been working on this were novices.” Musk realized the same thing and tried to articulate what he wanted. Even though the words were not precise, they were good enough to give von Holzhausen a feel for Musk’s vision and the confidence that he could deliver on it. “I said, ‘We’re going to start over. We’re going to work together and make this awesome.’”
To save money, the Tesla design center came to life inside the SpaceX factory. A handful of people on von Holzhausen’s team took over one corner and put up a tent to add some separation and secrecy to what they were doing. In the tradition of many a Musk employee, von Holzhausen had to build his own office. He made a pilgrimage to IKEA to buy some desks and then went to an art store to get some paper and pens.
As von Holzhausen began sketching the outside of the Model S, the Tesla engineers had started up a project to build another electric CLS. They
ripped this one down to its very core, removing all of the body structure and then stretching the wheelbase by four inches to match up with some of the early Model S specifications. Things began moving fast for everyone involved in the Model S project. In the span of about three months, von Holzhausen had designed 95 percent of what people see today with the Model S, and the engineers had started building a prototype exterior around the skeleton.
Throughout this process, von Holzhausen and Musk talked every day. Their desks were close, and the men had a natural rapport. Musk said he wanted an aesthetic that borrowed from Aston Martin and Porsche and some specific functions. He insisted, for example, that the car seat seven people. “It was like ‘Holy shit, how do we pull this off in a sedan?’” von Holzhausen said. “But I understood. He had five kids and wanted something that could be thought of as a family vehicle, and he knew other people would have this issue.”
Musk wanted to make another statement with a huge touchscreen. This was years before the iPad would be released. The touch-screens that people ran into now and again at airports or shopping kiosks were for the most part terrible. But to Musk, the iPhone and all of its touch functions made it obvious that this type of technology would soon become commonplace. He would make a giant iPhone and have it handle most of the car’s functions. To find the right size for the screen, Musk and von Holzhausen would sit in the skeleton car and hold up laptops of different sizes, placing them horizontally and vertically to see what looked best. They settled on a seventeen-inch screen in a vertical position. Drivers would tap on this screen for every task except for opening the glove box and turning on the emergency lights—jobs required by law to be performed with physical buttons.
Since the battery pack at the base of the car would weigh so much, Musk, the designers, and the engineers were always looking for ways to reduce the Model S’s weight in other spots. Musk opted to solve a big chunk of this problem by making the body of the Model S out of lightweight aluminum instead of steel. “The non-battery-pack portion of the car has to be lighter than comparable gasoline cars, and making it all aluminum became the obvious decision,” Musk said. “The fundamental problem was that if we didn’t make it out of aluminum the car wasn’t going to be any good.”
Musk’s word choice there—“obvious decision”—goes a long way toward explaining how he operates. Yes, the car needed to be light, and, yes, aluminum would be an option for making that happen. But at the time, car manufacturers in North America had almost no experience producing aluminum body panels. Aluminum tends to tear when worked by large presses. It also develops lines that look like stretch marks on skin and make it difficult to lay down smooth coats of paint. “In Europe, you had some Jaguars and one Audi that were made of aluminum, but it was less than five percent of the market,” Musk said. “In North America, there was nothing. It’s only recently that the Ford F-150 has arrived as mostly aluminum. Before that, we were the only one.” Inside of Tesla, attempts were repeatedly made to talk Musk out of the aluminum body, but he would not budge, seeing it as the only rational choice. It would be up to the Tesla team to figure out how to make the aluminum manufacturing happen. “We knew it could be done,” Musk said. “It was a question of how hard it would be and how long it would take us to sort it out.”
Just about all of the major design choices with the Model S came with similar challenges. “When we first talked about the touch-screen, the guys came back and said, ‘There’s nothing like that in the automotive supply chain,’” Musk said. “I said, ‘I know. That’s because it’s never been put in a fucking car before.’” Musk figured that computer manufacturers had tons of experience making seventeen-inch laptop screens and expected them to knock out a screen for the Model S with relative ease. “The laptops are pretty robust,” Musk said. “You can drop them and leave them out in the sun, and they still have to work.” After contacting the laptop suppliers, Tesla’s engineers came back and said that the temperature and vibration loads for the computers did not appear to be up to automotive standards. Tesla’s supplier in Asia also kept pointing the carmaker to its automotive division instead of its computing division. As Musk dug into the situation more, he discovered that the laptop screens simply had not been tested before under the tougher automotive conditions, which included large temperature fluctuations. When Tesla performed the tests, the electronics ended up working just fine. Tesla also started working hand in hand with the Asian manufacturers to perfect their then-immature capacitive-touch technology and to find ways to hide the wiring behind the screen that made the touch technology possible. “I’m pretty sure that we ended up with the only seventeen-inch touch-screen in the world,” Musk said. “None of the computer makers or Apple had made it work yet.”
The Tesla engineers were radical by automotive industry standards but even they had problems fully committing to Musk’s vision. “They wanted to put in a bloody switch or a button for the lights,” Musk said. “Why would we need a switch? When it’s dark, turn the lights on.” Next, the engineers put up resistance to the door handles. Musk and von Holzhausen had been studying a bunch of preliminary designs in which the handles had yet to be drawn in and started to fall in love with how clean the car looked. They decided that the handles should only present themselves when a passenger needed to get in the car. Right away, the engineers realized this would be a technological pain, and they completely ignored the idea in one prototype version of the car, much to the dismay of Musk and von Holzhausen. “This prototype had the handles pivot instead of popping out,” von Holzhausen said. “I was upset about it, and Elon said, ‘Why the fuck is this different? We’re not doing this.’”
To crank up the pace of the Model S design, there were engineers working all day and then others who would show up at 9 P.M. and work through the night. Both groups huddled inside of the 3,000-square-foot tent placed on the SpaceX factory floor. Their workspace looked like a reception area at an outdoor wedding. “The SpaceX guys were amazingly respectful and didn’t peek or ask questions,” said Ali Javidan, one of the main engineers. As von Holzhausen delivered his specifications, the engineers built the prototype body of the car. Every Friday afternoon, they brought what they had made into a courtyard behind the factory where Musk would look it over and provide feedback. To run tests on the body, the car would be loaded up with ballast to represent five people and then do loops around the factory until it overheated or broke down.
The more von Holzhausen learned about Tesla’s financial struggles, the more he wanted the public to see the Model S. “Things were so precarious, and I didn’t want to miss our opportunity to get this thing finished and show it to the world,” he said. That moment came in March 2009, when, just six months after von Holzhausen had arrived, Tesla unveiled the Model S at a press event held at SpaceX.
Amid rocket engines and hunks of aluminum, Tesla showcased a gray Model S sedan. From a distance, the display model looked glamorous and refined. The media reports from the day described the car as the love child of an Aston Martin and a Maserati. In reality, the sedan barely held together. It still had the base structure of a Mercedes CLS, although no one in the press knew that, and some of the body panels and the hood were stuck to the frame with magnets. “They could just slide the hood right off,” said Bruce Leak, a Tesla owner invited to attend the event. “It wasn’t really attached. They would put it back on and try and align it to get the fit and finish right, but then someone would push on it, and it would move again. It was one of those Wizard of Oz, man behind the curtain moments.” A couple of the Tesla engineers practiced test-driving the car for a couple of days leading up to the event to make sure that they knew just how long the car would go before it overheated. While not perfect, the display accomplished exactly what Musk had intended. It reminded people that Tesla had a credible plan to make electric cars more mainstream and that its cars were far more ambitious than what big-time automakers like GM and Nissan seemed to have in mind both from a design and a range perspective.
As with SpaceX, Musk preferred to build as much of Tesla’s vehicles in-house as possible, but the high costs were limiting just how much Tesla could take on. “The original plan was that we would do final assembly,” said Diarmuid O’Connell, the vice president of business development at Tesla. Partners would stamp out the body parts, do the welding and handle the painting, and ship everything to Tesla, where workers would turn the parts into a whole car. Tesla proposed to build a factory to handle this type of work first in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and then later in San Jose, California, and then pulled back on these proposals, much to the dismay of city officials in both locales. The public hemming and hawing around picking the factory site did little to inspire confidence in Tesla’s ability to knock out a second car and generated the same type of negative headlines that had surrounded the Roadster’s protracted delivery.