The Tesla Tale Part One

It was called tech Stuff looks at Elon Musk Uh sensibly enough, and I think in that episode we were like, yeah, we'll totally do an episode on Tesla Motors soon, and then we never did that thing. One year later to the day, it is March thirteen, two thousand and fourteen.

As we sit here in the studio, we are recording a pair of episodes, as it turns out, on Tesla Motors, because even though it's a young company, they've the company has done a lot of stuff and there's a lot of things to cover um largely in part to Mr Musk, who has had quite the impact on the technological world

and multiple venues, not just in electric cars. Right. He was not one of the original founders though, No, no, Back in two thousand three, there were a pair of silicon Valley investors named Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpinning who formed the company Tesla Motors, and their goal was to make a commercially successful electric car. In fact, they say they will not stop until every car on the road is electric. Now, neither of them had really any car experience,

I mean they drove them, but not making them. But they felt that they had the business plan that would make the electric car a viable option in the United States in particular. And you got to remember, if you know your car history, electric cars actually pre date internal combustion engine cars, so this is sort of a throwback

in a way. But trying to make the electric car actually work because everyone was always worried that the electric car would have a very narrow range of like you wouldn't be able to go very far sure, and also various um potential safety issues involving the materials the batteries were made out of worry that if it got too cold, you wouldn't be able to start your car, sure, and and also just the the general cheapness and propensity of

of gasoline. Yeah, the fact that they had been around and and been on top for a century meant that, you know, making making a road two use a pun into this industry. Yeah, there's the there's the high roll. Uh that would be would be you know, it's a significant challenge. So two thousand three they start up, and it wouldn't be until April two thousand four that Mr Elon Musk gets involved, right, he invested heavily in the company, like to the tune of six point three million dollars

and joined its board of directors. Yep and ebro Hard became the CEO of Tesla Motors that will become very important in a little bit. And together they planned to create for their first attempt, a high end sports car called the Tesla Roadster, which they estimated the original actual price, like what what customers would pay for it would be ninety two thousand dollars per car, and they wanted to have them on the road before the end of two

thousand six. Now this is April two thousand four when this is being discussed, and that is a pretty ridiculously lofty goal for anybody, let alone a consumer car company. Y I yeah, car company that has no manufacturing factories, no, like they have no anything, there's no infrastructure for them yet.

So it's it's very ambitious sure, and even more ambitious was that that wasn't their sole goal that they were planning, even at this very early stage, to to look ahead to to produce a luxury electric sedan UM for for competition with like Mercedes Benz and BMW stuff like that UM and then with with proven sales and profits from these two high end cars, to create a low cost electric line for everybody. Right, So, these first few ideas that they have, they admitted straight out like these are

high end items. This isn't the kind of stuff that you're gonna look at for the family car, unless you know, you happen to be of the Gates family or something. Uh, It's it's definitely one of those where people of high incomes are able to afford. In fact, there were many people who were criticizing Tesla for having a business plan that was catering only to rich people who wanted a third car. That was pretty much the way a lot of these early reports were going. Anyway, time passes and

not a lot to talk about. Between two thousand four and two thousand six, that was really when they were getting their business plan in order, starting to figure out what their production chain was going to be. But in August two thousand six, that's when they really started to promote the fact that you could put down a deposit on one of the first one hundred Tesla roadster sports cars. And it was a paltry deposit, just a tiny little amount, right,

a little bit more than they had originally plan. It was a hundred thousand dollars deposit deposit, meaning that there was actually going to be more to pay afterward. Uh. And a couple of notable people put down deposits. A lot of them were environmentalists or Silicon Valley millionaires. Also a famous actor, Mr George Clooney, he put down a deposit for one. But at that point there's still no roadster to actually drive yet, right, They hadn't really made

all that much headway on on that quite yet. As February two seven, they announced plans to build a thirty five million dollar plant in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to build what would be come the model S sedan, that electrics, that electric car you were talking about earlier than the luxury sedan, right, Yeah, So that was gonna be the

place where that would be built. And so they start to figure out that this is gonna be the method that they follow in order to uh to follow up the roadster plan once that was on uh into the streets. Still not there yet though, so uh they missed their two thousand six goal obviously of getting roadsters out there, but they're still working on it. And at September two thousand seven they hit another delay. And UH this was because they were having a lot of internal problems. There

were budgets they were getting slipped. I mean already you saw that they had planned on having being sports car, which presumably means that they thought they were going to sell it for more than what it costs to put it together. This is the way generally business is done. Sure that that price tag was eventually bumped up to a hundred nine thousand UM, but but they were finding out that some of their manufacturing processes were more expensive

than they had anticipated. Also that some of their manufacturing plants didn't have the physical capacity to create the stuff that they wanted to create, which is problematic. Yeah. Yeah, if you think this sounds kind of similar to when we were talking about SpaceX and and the challenges musk encountered in that, you'd be right. I mean, a lot of these are very similar problems, obviously two different scales, talking about driving on the roads versus blasting off into space.

But you know, it's one of those things where when you come from an Internet background the way Musk did, uh, and you then go into a manufacturing world, the world is very different and there's some realities that you've got to come face to face with. Absolutely. Meanwhile, speaking of manufacturing, around the same time, Musk began talking with German manufacturer UM Daimler about selling Tesla battery packs for for Dameler's lightweight and expensive smart cars, which were not yet available

in the US at that time. Um there's there's actually a really fun story about this, involving the Tesla ct O j V strable, like getting finance to give him a bag with twenty tho dollars in cash. So that's sounding like a fun story already. So that an engineer's friend who spoke Spanish could go to Mexico to Tijuana to to the nearest UM Daimler smart card dealer and drive back in a Smart Um and then they and so they did that, that is what they actually did.

And then they gutted it and put in a custom battery and engine to show it off to the Daimler heads when they came and visited their facility. So yeah, if you tell me fun story TiO Juana, Mexico, that's uh, that's a pretty crazy tale. Yeah, in November and December of two thousand seven, this is when controversy really hit Tesla Motors. Okay, so ebro Hard had been the CEO since around two thousand four, you know, once they had really started formally kind of organizing this company, and he

gets ousted, booted from his own company. Remember he was one of the co founders of this company. I think he got demoted and then kind of left. Sharply, I'm not I'm not positive it was a booting as much as a self booting. I think it was both. There was a lot of animosity involved there that Yeah, the demoting was clearly like it sounded like he was being demoted it into an advisory capacity, which kind of sounds like he's not being really part of the company anyway.

So yeah, it was definitely not a comfortable position, comfortable situation. And Forbes actually wrote an article right around that time. There was an article in Forbes about about this whole thing. Saying that it wasn't a huge surprise um partly because Eberhard had what they called limited management experience and he was the first time CEO and wasn't ready to be a leader for that And in fact, Musk said very similar things, but um Aberhard didn't really take it very well.

He actually sued the company and Elon Musk and claimed that Musk had defamed him and said that the defamation result it was was, what it was centered on, was that Eberhard was the reason that Tesla Motors had had so many delays. And he also added there was a breach in contract because under the contract he was supposed to receive the second Tesla roadster ever made, and he claimed that the car he ended up getting was a lemon and at thousand dollars worth of parts that need

to be replaced or something along those lines like. Essentially, he said that, uh, that he was cheated out of it. Now Musk on his part, he countered Musk, by the way, not really shy about sharing his opinion, particularly on any sort of blog he has access. He's pretty direct. Yeah, he will write in detail exactly like he will, and he goes very logically and very smugly. Yeah, yeah, there's

a little little smugness there. But he said that Eberhard had initially estimated that the cost of manufacture for a roadster would be around sixty five thousand dollars, which is what they based their nine two dollars starting price on, but then it ended up being more like a hundred forty thousand dollars per car just to make it, which is way above even that that in increased a hundred nine thousand dollar tag that they had come out with a little bit later. Yeah, so that means they're selling

cars at a loss. Now, this might work if your company makes I don't know, video game consoles and video games, you might be able to sell a video game console at a loss and make it up in the game sales later, especially if you're selling things in the millions of units. Yeah, make it up for volume. But in this case, if you're selling every unit at a loss, you don't make it up in volume. You just see lots and lots of money going out the door. So

it was definitely a contentious situation. So Eberhard gets the boot and uh for briefly. They ended up having a a CEO from outside the company come in, uh named Zev Drury. I believe that's how you pronounced the name. He is a former Israeli paratrooper and Um had a no nonsense attitude according to many reports, right and uh so Drury would be CEO briefly and then must would end up taking the helm later on. So then eventually

Musk becomes the CEO. Sure he would also put another twenty million dollars of his own funding into the company around that time, UM And simultaneously UM there was pressure from the market. Other car companies like like Chevy, We're starting to announce electric vehicles or even coming out with prototypes at their own right, right, so, you know, hybrids were already a thing at this point, but pure electric vehicles were very much in that sort of prototype concept

car stage. But now there was a more serious push behind it. I mean, Tesla had kind of proven just by people putting down a hundred thousand dollars as a deposit for a car that was still a year or two out of of production that you know, if that shows a demand, then other companies are going to jump on that as well. And it wasn't until March two thousand and eight two years after Tesla had planned on having the Roadster out there in the public, that Tesla

Motors actually began to produce the roadster. So the asking price, like we said, was a hundred nine thousand dollars at that point. And they announced at the same time that the Roadster was becoming available, that the model S Sedan would be available by twent ten and that same two year time frame. Huh yeah, because they learned so much from the first one. And in fact, we're gonna break down what the roadster was all about in just a moment, but before we do that, let's take a quick break

to thank our sponsor. Alright, So, the Tesla Roadster an electric sports car, something that a lot of people are

really skeptical about. They didn't really think an electric vehicle could have the performance of a sports car, right, one of those other concerns about electric cars, right, Exactly what was was getting the amount of power that someone who likes a good zippy car would really need, right, the idea being that you know, you know, those things have terrible acceleration and even even once you accelerate top speeds,

what like, I don't want an electric car. This was all about opening up people's eyes to what an electric car could do. And it's a sports car with an a c induction motor and a single speed gearbox, so we're not talking about like a five speed transmission. I'll go into more about what that gearbox does in the second. It also has a battery pack that Tesla calls the Energy storage system or e s S, and a power electronics module or PEM. So you don't really have an engine.

There's the engine is like an internal combustion engine. That's where you have all the gas and everything powering pistons moving. Yeah, this is just an electric motor. Yep. You're talking about electro magnetism really driving your vehicle here. And that single speed fixed gears job is to reduce the revolutions per minute or RPMs of the motor down to the right

RPMs for the axle. In other words, it's really converting the turns of one element of the vehicle into turns of another part of the vehicle so that the wheels turn the proper speed. Otherwise, you know, you'd either be crawling along or zipping through into the stratosphere. You know, you don't want that. You want to have a nice control of your vehicle. So yeah, there's no five speed transmission and on the other on the flip side, there's

no clutch, so that's nice. Uh, you know, there's there's only manual in a way because I'll get into it, but there's only there's only like two speeds on this thing and really just changes what the top speed and acceleration are. What are those top speeds and accelerations? Well, I'm glad you asked. It's a three hundred horsepower equivalent, so you can't wouldn't really say engine because it's a motor.

But it can go from zero to sixty miles per hour or about ninety seven kilometers per hour or our friends in other places besides the US in three point seven seconds, so fewer than four seconds. It can go zero to sixties. That's that's pretty impressive. And it's top speed is around one five miles per hour or about

two hundred one kilometers per hour. The body of this thing was a modified Lotus actually a Lotus frame that was manufact actured in England and sent to Tesla for final assembly, right because once again they didn't have a manufacturing plant to do all this, Like you know, any other major automotive company. They have these enormous factories where you know, that's where you see like all the robot arms coming in and zap and stuff and everything, and

these are handmade. Yeah, this is this is pretty impressive stuff like you got this and Bentley where you get that that handmade attention. So, this motor is able to operate continuously at around a hundred twenty degrees celsius. And

the first roadsters were air cooled. In other words, they had vents on the front of the vehicle and as the vehicle would move, air would be forced over the various elements inside the car and that kept it cool enough because, as we all know, electronics plus heat equals SAD electronics. So this was supposed to be efficient enough where you wouldn't need a different kind of cooling system. It also means there's no oil. You don't have to change the oil in a roadster because it just uses

air to cool all the elements. So you're moving parts. Yeah, that's a big big deal. Also, the motor had a had rather, the battery pack had a heating element as well, because if you were in really really cold parts to fix that potential, what if it's too cold to start

my battery exactly, so you spark the battery. Yeah, it really it's to get the chemical reactions in the battery to move, to move at the right rate to generate electricity a cold battery, the cold inhibits that chemical reaction, right, So the heater was really meant to make sure that chemical reaction keeps happening. Um. And the motor uses a prietary design to convert electricity into torque without losing too much energy in the form of heat. Uh. They talk

about using oxygen free copper to carry high current. Now, Tesla claims that the efficiency of the motor to turn electricity into torque is around eighty five to nine, which is insane. That is completely ridiculous. But keep in mind that that is the the the motor energy and not

the energy output of the entire car as a whole. Exactly. Yeah. So, if you were to take the whole car and say, all right, how much of the of the potential energy stored in the batteries is converted into actual energy moving the car, I'm guessing the efficiency is not at eight

five or ninety five, because that would be bonkers. Yeah, yeah, that's I would say that that's pretty physically impossible, considering that you have just attached a ton or so of metal and etcetera to Yeah, that engine, I mean half of the ton just goes to that e S S that energy system that we were talking about, the storage system, the battery essentially. Yeah, yeah, that way to about a thousand pounds. Have thousand pounds not not a light battery.

You will not be changing that on your own. According to Tesla, it packs four to five times the amount of energy density stores of other batteries, meaning that it can hold more energy than other batteries of that particular size. It's also recyclable, which is good because it will eventually run out. Sure um. And it's a lithium ion design, yes, which actually was a big deal. The reason why Tesla went with lithium ion is because that technology is really

well established. Like you probably have multiple electronics that run on lithium ion batteries. I've got a couple right here on me so y m s. People have some in their pockets right now. So that meant that because they were using this well established technology that has had uh manufacturing processes laid out for years, it helped bring the cost down of that element, which meant that it brings the cost down of the overall vehicle to prevent overheating.

Once you've worked the battery up to a workable temperature, um it had a liquid or has a liquid cooling circuit. Um that's that's water and anti freeze that circulate in sealed tubes through the array of cells. Right, So while the power train didn't have a liquid cooling or oil cooling, the these the actual batteries did, and that was again to keep them at that optimal temperature. Just like you were saying, Lauren, I mean you want you don't want to be too cold, but you don't want to get

too hot either. So each cell in the Tesla roadster battery is about the size of a double A battery, So if you've ever seen one of those, that's about the size of an individual cell. But there are a few of those. Yeah, six thousand, eight hundred and thirty one of those stacked up equals one E S S. Yeah. So if you handed me six thousand, eight hundred thirty one double A batteries, I think I would tell you

where that thousand pounds came from. Uh So, Yeah, it's a it's certainly impressive, but the neat thing is this is the energy system. This is providing all the energy for the card to move forward, and like Tesla says, there are no moving parts here, so it really cuts down on the required maintenance you need to do. Now, the roadsters travel range is about two hundred forty five miles according to Tesla, which is about three hundred ninety

four kilometers. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that every single roadster on a full charge is going to go and then just immediately stop like in a Warner Brothers cartoon. You know, uh, some of them could go actually much further. But that's that's kind of what they say because that way, you know, you you you hedge your bets a little bit so people don't push the car further than it's

meant to go. Sure, sure, it's much more critical than saying something about miles per gallon because it's a little bit right when when you can't just stop at any corner and getting rare battery gasoline. Right. In fact, that was a big concern again, like we were saying, you know, the worry that, hey, if I get an electric car, what happens when the battery runs out. What happens when I'm on a trip and the battery runs out? How

do I end up refueling? And Tesla's response was actually saying, well, take a look at how far you drive on a typical day. Most people aren't driving so far as to completely drain their tank of gas, I mean, on on their daily lives. You know, there are exceptions. We know there are people out there who have to do a

lot more driving than others. But for your average person, you might drive to a job, you might do some errands, you might come home, and that might be enough to you know, drain a quarter of a tank or something. But you don't have to refuel every single day, whereas with the Tesla Roadster you can just plug it in every night. So um, that was kind of the argument that Tesla made. They said that the battery life was estimated at about seven years or one thousand miles, and

at that point you would need to replace it. I don't know how expensive that is. I'm sure it's quite expensive to replace your battery, but it's you know, it's every seven years. The question is whether or not, I mean, if you're the kind of person who's buying a stay of the art sports car. If you're still driving that same sports car seven years later, you are not the kind of person I thought you were, and frankly, I don't know you anymore, or probably you can afford at

that juncture to replace the battery. Yeah, that's also that's also a possibility. That's good point, good point, much much less snarky than my point. That there are also sensors in the battery system that will disconnect it automatically if the car is in a crash or if any kind of like smoke, humidity, or water are detected inside the battery pack, which is really pretty important because lithium ion

batteries can totally explode when they get overheated. Yeah, this is one of those reasons why if you've ever flown on a plane and they tell you that they're going to gate check luggage, that if there's anything that has a lithium ion battery and it take it out, because it doesn't happen often, but it can happen, So it's one of those things where you'd rather take the precaution to remove it. So again, it's sort of a preemptive kind of measure. And a very important one as far

as safety is concerned. Now, next, you have the power Electronics Module, the p e M, which is the sort of computer brain of the Tesla, and it controls the two watts of electrical power during peak acceleration. So when you really want to get that, uh, that effect. I remember that they talk to people about, you know, trying to convince folks, uh to to really buy into this

electric sports car idea. One of the things Tesla used to do for people who are a little skeptical is they would take them for a test drive and they would be sitting there at a standstill, and the driver would tell the passenger, who is the person they're trying to impress, Uh, you know what, why don't we turn on the radio and see what's on and uh, you know,

listen to some music. And they would start to lean forward and that's when the driver would slam on the acceleration and the acceleration is so great that the person could not reach the radio controls because of the force they were feeling from the acceleration. It was a way that they convinced people like, Okay, this car might be for me, so uh, anyway that what's of power is equivalent to the amount of power you need to light two thousand incandescent bulbs or if you want to go

you know, you know away from incandescent. You say, what about those compact loorescence everyone's using these days? It could like ten thousand of those yep. It also over these were generative breaking, So that's when you're using the brakes to help recapture some energy and convert it back into electricity and recharge the batteries. Now obviously this is not meant to recharge the battery to full, but it helps keep that battery nice and freshly. It gives you that

two mile range. Yeah, and it also controls the voltages and currents that you you have to keep in mind whenever the maximum or minimum limits are coming into play. That really means like, if you want more speed, you're essentially saying more juice. It's kind of that. It's okay, So instead of opening the throttle, if you press the yeah, same same sort of things. In this case, you're like more electricity please. Um. Also, when you accelerate, the p M P E M converts your manual command, which is

pressing down on the accelerator. What we would normally call the gas pedal into a series of precisely timed voltages, which gives the propulsion motor the commands to generate the opper speed. Now now I get to charging it. That means that you get to use the handy dandy Electric Vehicle Service equipment or e v S. E allah. How Tesla makes all these things, these crazy acronyms that are making their their technology sound even more weird and futuristic,

it's because science. So you can't install one of these on your own unless you happen to be a qualified electrical technician because it's talking about some heavy duty power here. It does hook into your home system home electric system. So the system, like Lauren was saying earlier, it has a lot of automatic cutoffs, not just if you know water, yeah, exactly in case of accident or also just at home.

So there's a smoke detector that's on the charger itself that will turn off any electricity going to the car if it detects smoke. So that's whether it's in you know, coming from the car itself or anything else in the environment. Um it also will turn off any electricity right into the car if there's any tension that's detected, like unusual tension on the cable. So, for example, if the cable is on the floor of your garage and someone else drives into a two car garage and drives over that cable,

bill shut off the electricity to the roadster. And so it also will automatically shut off the flow of electricity when you try to detach it from the roadster, which is good. Good, so you don't have any yeah, cable shooting shooting deadly electric beams everywhere. That's how electricity comes out, right,

you know. We also mentioned that you don't have to do that regular maintenance that you would on an internal combustion engine vehicle, at least not the kind that we're used to, like no oil changes, you don't have to do filter changes, you don't have to do emission tests, you don't have to replace spark plugs, right right. They do recommend that you still bring it in once every year or about what's the yearly, likeeah, yeah, it's it's The idea is that just to make sure everything's in

working order. And there are of course other things that you would have to continue to maintain, like the tires. Those those don't magically become hyper resilient or something. Science. Yeah, if only now. Yeah, So, going on in June two thousand eight, Tesla Motors decided to build its manufacturing plant, but not in New Mexico, which is where they had talked about doing it. Yeah. Yeah, California offered up some pretty awesome tax breaks. Yeah, so they decided that, um,

they're gonna open up a store there. And the store opens in Los Angeles. In fact, they take a very interesting approach to selling cars. Tesla does instead of using um dealerships like third party dealerships, they sell direct to customers. And that's going to become an interesting point in our our second half, our second part rather so October two thou eight, this is when Elon Musk officially becomes the

CEO of Tesla Motors. Uh and uh, you know, it's also when things don't look so hot for the electric car industry or really any distribe for any industry. Yeah, that the global financial crisis was in full gear. Oh that was like a pun I didn't even intend to. Oh, I'm so proud of me. Okay, alright, but no, but I'm so proud of me talking about this really terrible global event where a lot of people lost a whole

lot of money in their homes. Um it was. It was a big issue, especially for the auto industry at the time, and um Uh Musk had to put off the models delivery until the company could receive some federal loan money. And in fact, Forbes would say that Musk's leadership was absolutely critical, saying that you know who would the federal government agree to loan money too if they

didn't have the crazy It wasn't Tony Stark. Yeah, essentially you needed to have a Tony Stark, someone who could charm them into I mean, I don't mean to be disingenuous, but they were saying that Musk kind of gives off this musk of leadership that people buy into, and he was able to to convince the various political powers that this is was an important investment and that it was in fact something that would be good for the future.

He also did appeal to his brother Kimball, who he had previously started some businesses up with before um for for a little bit of like much needed emergency funds. Towards the end of two thousand eight, there um and Hey did all of this during his messy public divorce from Justine musk Um and also while he was working through a whole lot of weird rocket issues over its SpaceX. Musk said at the time, at that point, every day was like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.

So cheerful guy. In December two thousand eight, he uh, he probably wasn't so cheerful either. A Tesla at that point generated thirteen point eight million dollars, which sounds really interesting, like how did they do that when you know the roadster was the only vehicle that they had out there and they weren't able to produce it in a huge amounts. How did they make eight million dollars? They did it

by selling low emission vehicle credits to other automakers. See, in California, automakers have to comply with low emission standards. The same for several other states too, But California has some particularly strict anti pollution laws, all right, Except the thing is is that you don't actually have to take

part in these anti pollution measures. You can fund other businesses that are taking part in anti pollution measures, and in return you get these credits, these low emission credits, which essentially say hey, you have a license to uh to ignore x amount of these restrictions if you have

the equivalent number of credits. And so it's really to offset vehicles that don't meet those standards, and Tesla as an electric vehicle, you know, with zero emissions, they had these credits that they could sell, and so they did, and so that was that was kind of the first bit of uptick for the company financially speaking that it had seen in a while. You know, it's it's they started getting a little bit out of that of this

of death at this point. Um in January two thousand nine, they would close a deal with daime Ler for Um for a thousand smart battery packs, and later in the year Dame Laer would buy a ten percent stake in Tesla, and in March two thousand nine, Tesla Motors unveiled a prototype and begins to take reservations for the model S. So within the first week, more than five hundred people sign up, and they said that the actual production wouldn't

begin until late two thousand eleven. So so again it really goes to show that there was a lot of interest in this company for people to go so far as to invest money in a product that they had not seen or sat in or driven at all. It did not exist yet and that wouldn't exist for another two years. But they were still willing to do it.

I mean, it really says a lot. Uh. You know that there's so much buzz about the company at the time, and and even more so when in June of two thousand nine, Tesla actually one a four hundred sixty five million dollar loan from the U. S Department of Energies at fanst Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program um and that was to help launch the Model S. But the caveat here was that they couldn't get that money until they

owned a mass production facility. Okay, you know that the whole gig of this loan was that the government really wanted alternate energy vehicles out on the road. But they wanted not like ten of them, not a hundred of them, not eight hundred of them for special buyers. They wanted mass production. They had been this entire time outsourcing the roadster, manufacturing and assembling those cars one by one behind their

Menlo Park, California showroom. Pay no attention to the engineers behind the guntain so yeah, I mean right now, if we were to stop the podcast right now and say that, let's say that this is June two thousand nine, things would look a little uncertain for for Tesla Motor Company. I'm not entirely sure they're going to be able to get that loan. They're not. They don't have that mass

production facility. They have a roadster that a lot of people like, but it's really expensive, and they have another vehicle that they've announced but no one's actually seen it yet. So we're gonna stop here, but our next episode we'll pick back up and talk about what Tesla has been up to since June two tho nine and the events that led to the unveiling of the Model S, as well as the announcement of other vehicles that they have

planned further down the line. So we're gonna break here, but guys, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, let us know. Send us an email. Our address is tech Stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle is text Stuff hs W. And hey, you should go to Tumbler too, because Lauren's been doing some awesome work over there. So yeah. She in fact, she's not shy about talking about it. Uh, but no, it really is

great tech stuff HSW there as well. Also, Hey, our six D tech Stuff episode is coming up, and we are in honor of that doing a kind of uh teken stuff behind the scenes of of tech Stuff episode

that we are taking lots of listener questions. So if you guys are curious about any particular part of our production process or the technology that we use to make this happen, or us or any of our wacky co hosts, or just what it's like to work here at how Stuff Works dot com, um, go ahead and and get in touch with us via any of those methods that Jonathan just mentioned right, will definitely be uh, including questions.

We will be saying your name in the podcast, assuming that your question is deemed to be appropriate and uh and and answerable. Some unanswerable questions we may also take. It will all be on a case by case basis, but we like answering the unanswerable here. Yeah, yeah, we give it a game. Try so let us know and we will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it have staff works dot com