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Last updated on July 2nd, 2017 at 12:34 pm
The Guardian, last Thursday:
New manufacturer Tesla Motors, based in the technology hot spot of Silicon Valley rather than the automotive heartlands of America’s midwest, is hoping to launch its first electric sports car early this year.
Maybe not. Tesla’s roadster – a kind of eco-engineered Lotus Elise – is beset with development problems (“the first production models will come with an ‘interim’ transmission that will get you from zero to 60 in 5.7 seconds instead of the originally touted sub-4 seconds”) and the company itself is in turmoil:
A few weeks ago, we asked Tesla Motors whether a pending departure of one employee we had heard about was part of a wave of layoffs at the company.
No, said Daryl Siry, vice president of marketing. It was an issue involving a particular individual.
It turns out that that more terminations were going on behind the scenes. Ousted Tesla CEO Martin Eberhard writes in his blog that 26 employees, including some vice presidents, have recently been cut from the company. That’s about 10 percent of the company.
Tesla’s corporate vision statement:
Historically, it seemed to us that electric cars had been designed by people who thought we really shouldn‘t be driving at all – but if we must, we should suffer every minute of it. Electric cars have had terrible range and embarrassing styling. To those who say electric cars have been tried and failed we say, of course electric cars won‘t catch on if no one actually wants to drive them.
They’re even less likely to catch on if nobody builds them.
