Marc Tarpenning - Tesla's High Speed Innovation at 2017 Product Leader Summit

If you pay closely to your electric vehicle history, you may be aware that Elon Musk is nothing more than a co-founder of Tesla Motors. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning started Tesla Motors, with Elon Musk joining shortly afterward as the Angel Investor. This talk is by Marc Tarpenning talking at Stanford University to a group of entrepenuerial people.

Martin and Marc had built and sold a previous company, and were looking for a new challenge. They decided to look at the Oil industry, that is to disrupt the Oil Industry out of existence. The primary place Oil plays is transportation, specifically for cars and light trucks. It's unrealistic to use biofuels -- for example corn-based-ethanol would require more arable land than exists in the USA to fuel the vehicles used in the USA. On the other hand, electric cars can be powered by the solar panels on the roof of the house. See Solar/Electric Vehicle Nirvana

They chose to build a sports car first because it's an area where they could more easily compete than other market segments. The electric drive was able to outpace gasoline powered cars because of "100% torque at 0 RPM". The Roadster doesn't do so well at a race track because they knew high speed wasn't so important for daily driving, and instead the 0-60 miles/hr time was most important.

The real plan was to make an extremely compelling attractive car at the high end, and then move towards the Sedan market.