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Eberhard 3 (1:50)
Topic(s): Auto Industry / Car Culture / Electric &
Hybrid
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Video Transcript
When people asked me what's different about Tesla cars, they
usually ask me for technological questions: is it the
different motors, is it the different batteries, the carbon
fiber bodies, what is it? And that sort of is the answer, but
the real answer is that we approach the problem from a
different way. We set about to build a car that people would
want to drive and we said, "let's build the very best car we
possibly can;" high performance, good handling, beautiful, the
right appointments, the right kind of materials to build it,
and say—and also of course from the electric
perspective—the right kind of driving range. And say ok,
now if we build that car, what's the price of that car? And
not a cheap car, but it's pretty competitive compared to cars
that it's performing similar to. So approaching making
electric cars from that perspective, from that attitude,
developed a completely different kind of car and opened up
technologies to us that wouldn't have been available other
wise. We would have never considered a lithium-ion battery
pack if we are trying to make a utilitarian car ‘cause
it's simply too expensive today; expensive just because the
batteries are expensive and also expensive because we are a
start up company and every single thing we do costs more than
a big car company with giant volume. So coming at the market
from the top with the high performance and relatively
inexpensive car makes a business that works and allows us to
develop the technology we need to consider lower-priced cars
and so on. But the difference for us was coming at it from the
perspective of building a great car first. That allowed us to
consider a proprietary and fairly expensive lithium-ion
battery pack allowed us to consider developing our own motor
and a factory to build that motor. It allowed us to consider
very, very high performance power electronics to drive all of
that and allowed us to consider all of the things to make a
great sports car—carbon fiber body, a high-class
aluminum chasse...
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