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.

Needless to say, we didn't get the Gullwing. And now, every year on my birthday I point out to my dear mother just how much a 300SL coupe is now worth. Sure the malnutrition would have stunted my growth, but I'd be driving a half-million dollar car, one of the greatest ever built.

So let's just say that I wasn't too broken-hearted to see the first generation of electric cars fade into ignominy. What I was blind to was the reality that the failure of electric cars was less due to Detroit's cleverness, than to its sheer stupidity.

Proof of that came the first day I saw a Prius. To my mind it was still an ugly car, but not as ugly. Indeed, driving Tad and Katy, the girl next door, to high school one morning, I happened to make some disparaging remark about a Prius I was blowing past, when Katy said, "I don't know, I think it's cute. Did you know we're getting one?"

Cute. That one word was my epiphany. The genius of the Toyota Prius was that it broke from the received view of electric car ownership as a political, or moral, act. Instead, depending upon your sensibility, you could actually buy a Prius for aesthetic reasons (heck, it looked a lot better than a Scion) and justify your purchase in terms of economy. And, the fact that it was a hybrid, not a purely electric car, meant that you didn't have to make the full gestalt shift to an electric vehicle, but still went through the familiar ritual of pumping gas, etc. -- just less often.

In retrospect, given this brilliant understanding of consumer motivation, it shouldn't be surprising that Toyota sold a jillion Priuses They scurry around my neighborhood like rolly-pollies scattering from under a rock. And though they have an unfortunate tendency to believe they can run with the big boys out in the fast lane, I've even learned to look upon them, if not fondly, than without loathing.

Not surprisingly, given the huge success of the Prius, we've seen other auto companies in the last couple years begin to emulate Toyota's brilliant move. And they've take the idea even further -- after all, the Prius still shows some of its old ugly electric car pedigree. Honda brilliantly made its new hybrid cars indistinguishable from its traditional line, only the eerie silence of its hybrid cars betraying the fact that everything had changed under the hood.

Even Detroit managed to get a clue, though I still find the idea of a hybrid half-ton pick-up a bit unsettling. Still, there are moments, especially when I'm putting seventy-five bucks in my gas tank, that a hybrid truck sounds like a pretty appealing concept.

Now, I can understand and forgive Detroit for missing this one After all, radically new technologies almost always come from the fringes, though with Toyota now the biggest car company on the block, the old excuse about American automakers focusing upon the middlebrow and the mainstream is getting a little thin. Still, you'd be a fool to expect quick responsiveness and design flexibility from Dearborn.

But now comes the Tesla out of my backyard, Silicon Valley. And when I heard about it I had the same epiphany as I did with the Prius. Here's a $100,000 sexy beast, Euro-styled sports car with Ferrari performance -- and it's electric. Not a dual-turbo gasoline racing engine, not a tweaked out hybrid, but a true electric car. And this puppy rocks: 0-60 in 3.9 seconds, top speed of 130 mph. And if you don't get that full-throated roar of tuned pipes, you do apparently get an interesting feel of the road from the sound coming off the tires.

In other words, if the Prius was an environmentally-conscious car you could actually buy for itself alone, the Tesla is the first electric car you might actually lust for. Why didn't anybody think of this sooner? Why especially didn't Detroit? After all, the U.S. automobile is in the lust business. Losing money and market share, peeling off assets, weren't those guys desperate enough to try a long shot like this? Shouldn't the 2007 Tesla have been the 2008 Viper?

As you might expect, the Tesla, even before its formal introduction, has been a sensation. The first manufacturing run, of 100, sold out almost instantly. Apparently, the 2007 run has now sold out as well. Just as important, some very smart Valley folks, the kind who are watched closely and emulated by everyone else, have invested in Tesla Motors -- notably Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the two Google founders, as well as two old acquaintances of mine, former eBay exec and current movie producer Jeff Skoll, and PayPal founder and current rocketeer Elon Musk (the latter is Tesla's chairman). The combination gives the Tesla something Detroit hasn't had in a while: cool.

That should make Detroit worried; what should make it terrified is the fact that by being electric, and technology-based, the Tesla has a very good chance of jumping on that bullet train called Moore's Law and quickly leave traditional automobiles literally in the dust. Traditional auto makers have brought electronics to the dashboard and the engine controller, the Tesla has a chance to bring it to the drivetrain. If you want to see what that means, look for the BMW 5 Series-like sedan coming reportedly coming from Tesla next year.

Is the Tesla all that we hope it will be? Probably not. The list of failed consumer products embraced by Silicon Valley tycoons is a long one. And it will interesting to see just how long it takes to charge one of these roadsters to get its 250-mile range. But you know, it doesn't really matter. In a crucial sense, the Tesla has already done its work: it's made electric cars sexy. And before it's over, that one accomplishment will revolutionize the auto industry, and even relocate in places like Silicon Valley.

If I was Ford, GM or Chrysler, I'd buy these guys right now and then get out of their way.

TAD'S TAB: With all of the worry about downloading mp3 files illegally from various clients, it turns out there is still a way to get around the p2p networks. With The Hype Machine (www.hypem.com) you can search music blogs, often produced by bands themselves, for downloadable music files. Although Hype Machine specializes in indie and underground music, if you really must do it, you still have a chance of finding Kelly Clarkson's latest hit.

This work is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone, once called the Boswell of Silicon Valley, is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News, as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is best-known as the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNEWS.com "Silicon Insider" columnist since 2000.