Tesla: The Origin Story | Hacker News Reader

Tesla: The Origin Story

businessinsider.com

195 pointscoloneltcb35 comments

Origin story? Maybe. The coverage up through 2008 was good, but then the author pretty much shortcut the rest of the article. They made no mention of the immense financial difficulties Tesla faced in the 2007-2008 era, which is of significant historical importance. The article completely omitted the actual shipment and reception of the Roadster, and the subsequent development of the Model S.

Nonetheless, it was nice to read about the very early history of the company, some of which was unknown to me. I note the parallels to Steve Jobs in this story, and how effective Tesla's PR machine is -- Musk really likes being portrayed as the founder.

Not a good start. Second and third sentences in:

> The last successful American car startup was founded 111 years ago. It's called Ford.

This isn't remotely true. Ford was founded in 1903. GM was founded in 1908. AMC was a merger of two companies, one founded in 1937 and the other in 1909. Chrysler was founded in 1925. And that's just the big four.

I'd argue (perhaps weakly) that Ford was the last car company started by people from outside the industry.

Reading the Wikipedia article, this statement may be based on the fact that Ford was the last American car company to IPO (in 1956) making it the last one to count as a startup.

I don't think so, as 1956 wasn't "111 years ago".

It says it was founded 111 years ago, not that it IPOed 111 years ago.

Ford did not go bankrupt or have to be bailed out by the government.

Irrelevant, unless your criteria for "successful" requires the company to keep going until the end of time, which is not how most people look at it.

I don't see why Elon isn't more direct about addressing the company's early history. Why not say "I had to ditch the original founder of Tesla for various reasons, then work really hard to get our first car out at a quality level requisite for the future success of the firm. That's what happens when you lose the confidence of the board and your biggest investor, tough luck".

The article is quite interesting overall. However, it is very Eberhard centric and does a poor job of detailing the substantial challenges Elon faced getting the first car successfully manufactured, as well as the financial challenges and the US Govt. loan, and all sorts of other fascinating details. A book, perhaps, would work better than an article.

for anyone else wanting to read Elon Musk's story in more depth, I can't recommend "The Engineer" by Erik Nordeus enough. He basically compiled titbits of information from various interviews and articles and reconstructed the timeline of Elon Musk's public life into a great biography.

https://leanpub.com/theengineer

Thank you!

/The author

no problem at all - thanks for all the hard work you put into the book!

Thank you for creating - looks like an interesting read. Just purchased.

Awful lot of negative comments here. I thoroughly enjoyed the article. Was it biased? Everything is. But it explained a bunch of history that I didn't know in narrative form, which I appreciate.

Great article, But didn't cover the launch of roadster. The whole article was buidling for that ending. Still I wasn't aware of most of the history so was a nice read.

I feel so sad, I worked at an electric car company in the beginning of the 2000's (as a summer job), and we all knew that those cars were mechanically far better than the combustion engine ones. You had constant power from 500 to 10000RPM, they broke some differential gears during R&D.

But the cars makers canned the projects one after the others. It's the telecom industry who paid for the battery R&D in the end.

Wait - did Business Insider do original reporting?

I think that's one of the signs of the apocalypse.

I was thinking the same. The first thing I do any time I open a BI link (on that rare occasion), the first thing I do is check if they have listed a source, and go read the source.

It's interesting to contrast Tesla and Fisker.

Even more interesting to see the links between the two companies.

The Wikipedia page on the model S says it's designed by one Franz von Holzhausen and doesn't mention Fisker at all but on the page of Fisker Automotive you read this:

"On April 14, 2008, Tesla Motors filed a lawsuit against Fisker Automotive, alleging they stole Tesla's technology and are using it to develop their own hybrid car, the Fisker Karma, which was announced at the North American International Auto Show in January 2008. Tesla's suit claims that the design work done for the Model S by Fisker Coachbuild was substandard, and that Fisker diverted its best ideas to the Karma. In early 2009 the suit was settled in Fisker's favor and Tesla was ordered to pay Fisker more than US$1.1 million in legal fees."

I wonder how much of the Fisker design is still present in the model S or if they tossed it all and redid the whole thing. When I first saw the Model S and the Karma side-by-side I thought 'wow, those two look quite similar in a way' with the Model S the clear winner (the Fisker looks kind of odd up close).

Article says, "On April 23, 2003, Tarpenning bought the domain name Teslamotors.com", but whois creation date shows 2003-04-03. Is that possible?

Ouch, the bias is dripping from this article. Choice of pictures and wording is quite provocative.

I don't think I will ever understand how a Business Insider article can get 45 points.

Because it mentions Tesla. Spend some time in /r/technology and you will see just how pervasive the Tesla love is amongst the technical community. There's nothing rational about it.

You're getting downvoted, but I think it's true.

The tech community often roots for the underdog v/s the Goliaths. Just look at the MS/IBM hate; and the love for Apple when it was struggling earlier this century (of course that has changed now)

They make a really nice product, and they managed to succeed as a new company in an old and hidebound industry. Further, it's an industry that most of us spend a lot of money on, that often dissatisfies us, and Tesla is making a good attempt to fight some of the core areas of dissatisfaction. This makes it really interesting to a lot of people, rationally.

The more you read about great companies the more you realize that this is the key :

  Eberhard realised that Musk was the first guy he had met
  who shared his vision for electric cars: Make a vastly 
  superior car, not just a car that sucks less.

This is why Google won, and again with Gmail, why Facebook worked (compare it to the only "social networks" that preceeded it - dating sites and you'll see how it's vastly superior), and even before, why Microsoft won (visual basic being the truly superior product).

We also know that design-by-committee approach of large companies can only ever produce mediocre products. Low-risk mediocre products. Most or all of these are doomed. A lot of stuff is ready for complete disruption.

Could you elaborate please, what's the key? Partnership? Visionaries?

Vastly superior products. That's also why the iPhone was the first broadly successful smartphone. MS Windows was also at one point a vastly superior product.

Windows was, IMO, never a superior product. It saw success because it had superior licensing agreement, not because of its quality.

This seems nearly tautological to me. Without knowing how to make a vastly superior product, and without knowing how to tell whether a product is vastly superior before testing it in the crucible of the market, this conveys no information.

You make it sound very simple. But how do you make a vastly superior product, and do so without going bust? Thats the real key.

How do you know design-by-committee doesnt work? Apple has design critiques all the time for anything they make. Thats definitely by comittee.

Knowing several people at apple and microsoft, I definitely get the impression that at apple, very few people know about a product. At microsoft everybody knows and "contributes".

Maybe you're right about committees at apple, but I think they're at least a lot smaller than committees at their competitors.

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