interview > eberhard > eberhard 19

Eberhard 19 (0:45)
Topic(s): Electric & Hybrid
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Video Transcript

You know it's interesting, an interesting thing, if you look at the Tesla Roadster, a lot of the complexity that you find in a typical car has moved out of mechanical things and into electrical things and software. So for example, a typical gasoline engine, if you take apart a typical high-performance gasoline engine, there's going to be something like 200 moving parts in that thing, and running at high temperatures and up and down and around and around and the usual thing. If you look in our motor, there's one moving part. And that drives a very, very simple transmission: far, far fewer parts than a typical one. But to make that motor do its thing requires a fairly large box of fairly sophisticated silicon, and a lot of software behind it to make it do what it needs to do. So a large amount of the drive train development was pretty natural to do right here in Silicon Valley.