Barir's World

IT WAS LIKE FRANKENSTEIN, only faster. JB Straubel, in 1999 an emerging superstar in Stanford University's school of engineering, had been haunting the student machine shop, fabricating parts for his '84 Porsche 944 from midnight until 4 in the morning. Working by trial and error, he developed his own power controller and charger. He mated together two electric motors with a homemade coupler and belt system. He gutted the car and crammed in 840 pounds' worth of lead-acid batteries. Start to finish, the project took him a year.

By early 2000, Straubel had taken a piece of once-state-of-the-art German engineering and transmogrified it into a pretty advanced science-fair project: The World's Fastest Electric Car. Or so he hoped. With 180 kilowatts at his disposal (about 240 horsepower), the car had enough power, he estimated, to set an electric-vehicle world record for the quarter mile. Just one problem: Total range was 20 miles. What good is it, he figured, to build an all-electric emission-free dragster, if you're just going to tow it to the racetrack on the back of a big truck?

And so Straubel set about doing what any driven, somewhat obsessive-compulsive engineering graduate student would do. He bought a Volkswagen Beetle for $500, chopped it in two with a shop saw, and used a trailer hitch to attach the back half—the part with the engine and driven wheels—to the rear of the Porsche. He ran a remote throttle and ignition from the VW to the Porsche's driver's seat. From there, he sat and steered while his mongrelized single-axle trailer pushed the 944 down the road.

“ I drove it 800 miles to Oregon,” Straubel says. The problem was not the obvious potential for jackknifing. Rather, it was that while he was up ahead in the Porsche, the clutch and stick shift were back in the VW. “I'd leave it in third or fourth gear and start off under the Porsche's power,” he recalls. “The VW would lug and make all these terrible noises until I got up to speed. Then I'd turn on the ignition, and it would start running and pushing the Porsche. That was a hell of a trip.”

The Porsche did eventually break the world record for the electric-vehicle quarter mile—17.278 seconds at 79.14 mph, set at Silent Thunder 2000, a National Electric Drag Racing event in Sacramento, California. Today Straubel finds that time embarrassing. His latest all-electric creation is faster off the line than a 510-horsepower Lamborghini Gallardo. More important, it can run 250 miles between charges, not 20, in large part because it's powered by laptop batteries. And beginning later this year, anyone with $100,000 can buy one straight off the assembly line.

Straubel has proven that he can build an electric car that's as good as gas—one that doesn't sacrifice power, range or speed. But does that mean the Tesla Roadster heralds a new era of electric vehicles on every street corner, as he believes? Or will the Tesla, impressive as it is, be remembered as just another electric-vehicle science-fair project?

STARTING IT UP

Straubel was among the first hires at Tesla Motors, the San Carlos, California, startup that's building the Roadster. The 31-year-old's title is chief technical officer, though with his healthy mop-top, he looks ridiculously young for the job. His challenge is to create a practical electric car that's also a thrill to drive. Convincing the world (and the venture capitalists in the world) that the company isn't nuts for trying, that falls to Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, the two former Silicon Valley engineers who created Tesla in 2003.

Straubel's two bosses had just sold their pioneering electronic-book-reader technology in 2000 and were eager to do something that could help amend the world's environmental problems. Their idea: an electric car that people would want to own and that didn't have the limited range of previous electrics. The explosion of the portable-electronics industry had created a huge market for efficient, lightweight lithium-ion batteries. All they had to do was exploit the economies of scale and use these laptop batteries to power an electric car. Their strategy was to make it irresistibly fun, not the sort of painfully dull electric vehicle—what Eberhard calls a “punishment car”—that would only be driven by those who saw cars as a necessary evil. Once they demonstrated their success in a low-volume “halo” car, they would move on to build electric sedans.

When Tarpenning and Eberhard incorporated Tesla in 2003, they needed two things: First, an engineer who could make the plan work. Second, an angel to pay for the substantial R&D that lay ahead. The two of them started trolling Sand Hill Road, cold-calling Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Most of their pitches netted zilch. Although the idea of powering a car with lithium-ion batteries didn't make the investors hugely nervous, the dismal track record of most efforts to launch new car companies made them leery.

And then they talked to Elon Musk. Even among Bay Area pioneers, Musk is a bit of a risk-taker. He had sold PayPal, the company he co-founded, to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002 and promptly started SpaceX, a venture that would design, build, and launch rockets to serve what he foresees will be a growing demand for low-cost access to space. The company is one of two that won contracts—SpaceX's share was $278-million—from NASA last August to design a small crew and cargo launch vehicle to supplement the next space-shuttle replacement.

Here on Earth, Musk has an abiding interest in alternative energy. To date, he's provided about $27 million of the $60 million raised by the Tesla. “I'm hoping it can become one of the major car companies of the 21st century,” he says. “It's got a great opportunity to change the world.”

So that left the matter of finding a lead engineer. The challenge here, they found, was that electric-vehicle experts, though ever enthusiastic, weren't necessarily great engineers. “JB's name came up during a Google search,” Eberhard recalls, “but I wasn't sure if he was wacko or not.”

Straubel was already working on an electric-vehicle project of his own, partnering with a team of Stanford students to build an electric car—never completed—that would go up to 3,000 miles on 10,000 laptop batteries charged once, and he lived less than a mile from the small, second-story office that Tesla was working out of. He met with Tarpenning and Eberhard and enthusiastically agreed that the future of electric vehicles was going to be built from lithium-ion batteries. Straubel mentioned that he'd once approached their backer, Musk, about funding an experimental aerospace project. Eberhard phoned Musk, who was on Straubel's list of references, after the meeting. 

“ What do you think of this guy JB Straubel?” Eberhard asked. Musk replied, “I was thinking of offering him a job at SpaceX.” Tarpenning and Eberhard got to him first.

A HUNGER FOR POWER

Good engineers solve big problems with complex solutions you could never understand. Great engineers apply such simple solutions that you can't believe you didn't figure them out yourself. Witness Straubel's work on the unmanned, hydrogen-powered, high-altitude, ultra-long-endurance airplane that he developed for the communications industry. 

This was in 2001, two years out of Stanford, when he collaborated with Harold Rosen, an engineer 50 years his senior best known for inventing the geosynchronous satellite. The airplane had to loiter within a very small slice of airspace to efficiently relay messages. The engine had to run at a constant speed to maximize efficiency. But to stay in one place in variable wind conditions, the airplane's speed had to change all the time.

How to alter airspeed without changing engine power? Straubel's solution was to adjust the altitude. Ascend to slow down, descend to speed up. “It was a very simple, yet very elegant, solution,” says Rosen, a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame who speaks of Straubel with almost paternal affection. “He was sensational.”

Growing up in Wisconsin, Straubel played with Legos and chemistry sets. When he was 12, he brought a long-dead golf cart back to life as his first car. His idea of fun was visiting power plants and cement factories, the seeds of a lifelong interest in energy. “It's what defines our entire society,” he says. “It's unseen, but it's what allows the room to be hot, the lights to be on, food to be cooked.”  

Straubel gets his residential power from second-hand photovoltaic solar panels that he personally repaired and installed on his roof, but don't mistake his work for activism. “Compared to many of my friends, I'm not an incredibly committed environmentalist,” he says. Instead, he thinks environmentalism is a natural by-product of smart engineering. “The common thread running through everything I've done is sustainability. If you engineer something correctly, it won't wreck the environment. I believe we can find ways to do everything we do today—and more—in ways that are more benign.”

But he's also been involved in enough failed alternative-energy projects to understand the bottom line, and that's where the Roadster faces another obstacle. “Tesla can't just give cars away,” he says. “Anybody can build a million-dollar car and sell it to somebody for $50,000. The real challenge is getting consumers to pay you your cost and more.” 

THE BATTERY PROBLEM

During the early days of the Roadster project, Straubel hosted endless gatherings of Tesla's young engineers around the pool in his backyard. To the neighbors, it sounded like the Fourth of July—a symphony of small explosions. But these weren't drunken bacchanals. The engineers were burning, blowing up, and sledgehammering lithium-ion battery cells to determine exactly what ramifications Murphy's Law held for the Roadster. All over Straubel's yard, you can still see the scorch marks left from these crude failure-analysis experiments.

The success or failure of the company rests on the durability of these battery cells. Electricity is cheap, powerful and plentiful, but designing a car to run on it is anything but easy, as many owners of long-forgotten, failed electric-car companies could well attest. Limited range has always been their major cause of failure.

The General Motors EV1 was infamously yanked off the market in 2001 after only five years. It wasn't sabotaged by cynical automakers or greedy oil companies. What killed the electric car were anemic batteries (though GM's heavy-handed repossession of EV1s from their loving owners did not help to clarify the situation). First lead-acid and then nickel-metal hydride kept the heralded EV1 from going more than 100 miles on a full charge.

Lithium-ion batteries, introduced commercially in the 1990s, seemed to offer a solution. They can hold about double the charge per pound of anything that had come before. But the most common lithium-ion battery on the market—its name, 18650, is based on its measurements of 18 millimeters wide and 65 millimeters long—is designed for consumer electronics. It takes nearly 7,000 of them to power a sports car.

And that, of course, creates other problems. What if one of the batteries caught fire? (The danger of this was highlighted by last year's small epidemic of exploding laptop batteries.) A smoldering computer is a bummer; an electric car engulfed in flames is a catastrophe. Hence the lithium-ion piñata parties in Straubel's backyard (Tesla later turned to a failure-analysis lab for more rigorous testing).

  Straubel then had to figure out the best way to physically assemble the batteries. The team started by supergluing cells together. Straubel vetoed this approach because it was deemed unsafe—and because he came home one evening to find a battery pack permanently affixed to his kitchen table. He eventually subdivided the battery pack into 11 sheets containing 621 cells apiece. In each sheet, the batteries slot into a structure that looks like a miniature wine rack. 

He then spent the better part of a year trying to keep the rig from overheating. Originally he wanted to air-cool the battery pack. Air is free, after all. But lithium-ion batteries are extremely sensitive to heat. Consistent temperatures above 95 degrees inside the battery pack would shorten the lives of the batteries. Because the pack was so big and airflow so uneven, fatal hot spots kept popping up. The cooling team tried a bunch of potential solutions—ducts, blowers, manifolds, plenums. After months of work, they realized that sticking with air-cooling would mean cutting the size of the battery pack, which would compromise the car's range. Instead Straubel opted to create a water-cooling system. This wasn't the work of a day; Tesla had to develop its own proprietary technology. But the battery pack is now fitted with a lattice of tubes that route cold water and antifreeze past each individual cell.

Fully charged and operating at peak efficiency, the battery pack gives the Roadster a range of 250 miles. Straubel predicts that it will retain 70 percent of its energy capacity after five years and 50,000 miles. Will this be good enough for the average buyer? It's certainly not a perfect solution, especially considering the not-insignificant cost of replacing the batteries—an estimated $20,000.

Cost is a major reason that Chevrolet designed its own electric entry—the recently unveiled Volt concept car—with a hybrid powertrain that uses a small gasoline engine to help charge a lithium-ion battery pack. “You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that 6,831 batteries is a very expensive solution,” says Volt vehicle-line director Tony Posawatz. “That's fine for a $100,000 vehicle, but we're looking at much higher volumes, so we're interested in larger cells with higher energy content.” Jim Hall, vice president of industry analysis at the research firm AutoPacific and a veteran of the GM Impact prototype program, which was the EV1's predecessor, is similarly dubious. “The battery pack is a classic example of an expedient stopgap,” he says. “It's not optimized for automotive use, and it's not designed for the environment it's going to operate in. It's one of those ideas that looks like a wonderfully simple solution to a complex problem—but isn't.”

Straubel has heard these criticisms before. “Some people say, ‘You're not using the perfect battery,' ” he says patiently. “Fine. Where is the perfect battery? We're not against it. We're not shunning it. We just don't see it.” GM, for its part, openly admits that the battery technology needed to make the Volt a reality does not yet exist. The company hopes a third-party supplier will invent it. Straubel is not willing to wait.

  THE SILENT KILLER

The satisfaction of driving the Tesla Roadster comes from acceleration: 0–60 in less than four seconds. That's racecar territory. When he's giving thrill rides, Eberhard likes to tell passengers to turn on the radio. As they lean forward, he nails the throttle, and the acceleration shoves them back in their seats before they can reach the dial. It's a geeky move, but it makes his point. With the electric motor limited to 13,500 rpm and 250 horsepower, the car tops out at a relatively modest 130 mph. But, as is typical with electric motors, it produces huge amounts of torque from the second you hit the gas all the way up through 8,000 rpm. This means the Roadster could get by with a single gear, although Tesla put in a Pole Position –like two-gear setup to give lead-foots a lower gear for giggle-inducing stoplight-to-stoplight performance. And because the configuration is based on the super-agile Lotus Elise, it handles as well as anything on the road, including the green 2000 Porsche 911 that Straubel usually drives. “The Porsche is frustrating as hell to drive compared with the Roadster,” he says. “First of all, you have to shift gears. And it's an enormous amount of work to drive anywhere close to the limit. And sometimes I feel silly making all that freaking noise accelerating from a stoplight.”

The first Roadsters are scheduled to start rolling down the Lotus Cars assembly line in Hethel, England, this summer. The entire first run—fewer than 100 cars—has been sold, and about 300 orders have been placed for next year, when 1,000 to 2,000 Roadsters will be built.

This, Straubel is convinced, simply marks the beginning. He predicts a million electric vehicles on the road in 10 years. Will they all be powered by thousands of laptop cells? Not a chance. Tesla needs a battery breakthrough to thrive. But 18650s are right here, right now, and Straubel has figured out how to get enough range out of them to make the Roadster into a viable proposition. It's the sexiness of this sports car that is its best chance of survival, though, and for all his hard work on the Roadster's guts, Straubel seems to recognize that. “When I'm driving the Roadster, I just love pulling up to the guys who have the hopped-up Civic Si's or whatever,” he says. “I'm totally quiet. But the next thing you know, I'm gone through the intersection, and all I can hear is this roaring exploding behind me.”