When you think of Tesla what is the first thing that pops into your head? Does the luxury car of the future comes to mind, or does the all electric and zero fossil fuel car come to mind? This is what most people think of this prosperous car start up, but do you know the full history of this company? Does the word eBook, tZero, or Martin Eberhard ring a bell? If not then this article should be quite informal as I write about a article I read from businessinsider.com called “The Making of Tesla: Invention, Betrayal, And The Birth Of The Roadster” by Drake Baer. This article begins by explaining modern day Tesla and how it is very difficult for any start ups to be successful since the last one to date was founded 111 years ago which was the Ford …show more content…
What Eberhard was trying to prove to Smith was that a electric car is the only car that can provide performance and efficiency in a luxury vehicle. Later they met with Marc Tarpenning who in the past use to work for Textron. Tarpenning and Eberhard became friends and created the company Rocket e Book. They wanted to take advantage of the advances in battery technology and was shipping 20,000 unites in 1999 and then the next year was able to sell the company for $187 million. After the sell they were motivated to start up a new company. They also wanted to by a sports car that didn't get terrible gas mileage so they decided to create a high performance electric vehicle that they wanted. They were trying to figure out what the best fuel would be for their imaginary car and found electric to be the best overall fuel. They then went to AC Propulsion who was a a electric car maker and discovered their car the tzero. Eberhard then invested into the company and tried to blend the company with Tesla but was unable to successful merge with the company so they instead came into a agreement to share technology. Tarpenning also was reading up on the battery …show more content…
These future entrepreneurs also noticed that the market was very inviting for start ups since a lot of the parts for the car part of the manufacturing was outsourced and had plenty of partners ready. Later on in 2003, Eberhard went to Disneyland with his girlfriend and after trying to come up with a name that was not to over Eco sounding they finally came up with the name Tesla witch is the inventor of the motor he planed to use for his future car. And in 2003 they had finally incorporated Tesla. When they finished there business plan they finally started to raise money for their car but they hit many road bumps. They firstly didn't think it would be good to sell through a dealership because you would lose opportunities to gather feedback from the customers. They also learned that it would be risky if the franchisee (dealerships) didn't fall through with their plan and the dealerships would be protected but not them. They also considered the politics they could play with both democrats and republicans. By 2004 they had acquired a lot of small investments from