Silicon Insider: Tesla Time

March 22, 2007 — -- It's Tesla Time, baby.

Long before the recent documentary, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" I believed that the major automobile manufacturers hated the idea of electric vehicles, and were doing their best to bury them forever by simultaneously pretending to support the technology -- while at the same time designing electric cars of such surpassing butt-ugliness that only self-righteous Sixties trolls and Hollywood celebrities would actually buy them.

I had this image in my mind of some senior executive at General Motors looking up from the paper and saying to his executive assistant, "So those clowns want an electric car, eh? Fine, let's give 'em one. We'll make it look like some of Jetsons meets Mendocino toymobile -- Fender skirts! Don't forget the damn fender skirts! -- and make it so freaking slow that everyone around them on the freeway wants to drag the driver out on the shoulder and beat him to death. Oh, and make it take forever to charge, and give it some stupid gizmo name like EPV or something so that any red-blooded American driver would feel sexually humiliated just parking near it.

"And when the California legislature starts hinting again about requiring low-emission cars in the future, let the citizens of the Golden State see what they're going to turn in their beloved rice rockets, beemers and Suburbans for."

And it worked -- for a while. The U.S. automakers got to put on a sad face that said, look, we really, really tried to make this electric car thing work, but nobody was enlightened enough to buy them. So, if you don't mind, we'll just go back to putting more horsepower into the new Corvette.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love big old gas-guzzling internal combustion engines. I drive a four-door club cab GMC Sierra with the big block, and in my private fantasy I can't decide between the Aston Martin Vanquish and the Maserati Quattroporte, so I just say to hell with it and buy both, and have the dealer throw in the old 427 Cobra parked out back while he's at it. I'm restoring a 36 Ford 3-window coupe with a carburetor that's little more than a funnel into the flathead V-8, as well as a '58 Studebaker Golden Hawk (bless you, Raymond Loewy!) with a supercharger.

And apparently it's in the blood. I spent my childhood in a succession of T-birds, and the earliest movie of me is as a baby in the back of my folk's '57 Chevy on a road outside Spokane, Washington, with my old man driving along at 100 miles per hour.

My mom tells the story that while my dad was stationed in Germany doing spook work, he happened to swing by a car show being held where we lived in Munich. This was 1955, and my father came home that day and declared he had found our new car: the newly introduced Mercedes 300SL coupe. That's right, the Gullwing. When my mother inquired how much it cost, my dad hesitated, then said, "$5,000." After noting that that was exactly my dad's annual take-home pay as a 1st Lieutenant, my mom pointed towards me in the cradle and enquired how I was going to eat.