“This is one of the most historic cars,” Mr. Musk told the gathering of customers, reporters and famous friends lounging on black-and-white couches beneath giant screens projecting photos of cars, beaches and, inexplicably, babies and explosions. “You’d have to go back very far to see when a car this important was unveiled.”
Like Tesla’s first automobile, an electric sports car called the Roadster, the Model S was sleek, sporty and quiet as a whisper. For a certain class of deep-pocketed buyers, it was lust-inducing, even if they may have never before given a thought to torque or throttle. It would sell for $57,400 — or $49,900 after tax credits, or $35,000 after factoring in gas savings, Mr. Musk advised his audience.
The sedan fits five adults as well as two children in rear-facing seats, Mr. Musk said, and could drive halfway across the country between breakfast and bedtime. It would, he said, be on the road in 2011. Tesla already had a factory lined up and hundreds of millions of dollars in financing on the way from the Energy Department.
Today, production of the Model S hasn’t even begun. Some critics doubt whether the sedan can actually transport seven passengers. And Mr. Musk concedes that driving halfway across the country would take at least 16 hours at a rather heady average speed of 75 miles an hour — not including stopping at swapping stations that Tesla has yet to build to change a heavyweight battery that will have, at best, a 300-mile charge.
Now Mr. Musk says the Model S will be on the road in 2012. The federal loans didn’t land in Tesla’s coffers until this year, and the factory, like two before it, fell through.
Still, the company has made some concrete strides. It recently bought a closed Toyota-G.M. plant in Fremont, Calif., and Toyota invested $50 million in Tesla as part of a partnership to jointly develop electric cars. While Tesla managed to sell its shares to the public for the first time last month, raising $226.1 million, the shares have dropped to $21.29 from an early high of $30.42.
“It eerily reminds me of the DeLorean,” says Scott Sweet, a partner at a financial advisory firm called IPO Boutique, referring to the futuristic, stainless-steel sports car with gullwing doors built by John DeLorean in the early 1980s.
Mr. DeLorean attracted high-profile investors and dreamed of building the next great automobile enterprise company, but ultimately went bankrupt after producing just one model. Mr. Musk, 39, shoots down the comparison.
“Tesla’s really not about starting a car company,” he says. “It’s really about accelerating the transition to a new phase of technology in the car business, and I think it would be very difficult to start a car company where you don’t have really any differentiated advantage, where you’re just another gasoline car.”
“And at the end of the day,” he adds, “the DeLorean was not a great sports car.”
Full of brio and spin, the response is vintage Musk — and yet another chapter in an entrepreneurial odyssey that is as emblematic of how reputations are made and undone in Silicon Valley as it is of Mr. Musk’s own strengths and weaknesses.
With a fortune derived from two hot Internet companies that he helped build and sell, Zip2 and PayPal, Mr. Musk has since invested almost all of his money and time in SpaceX, a spaceship company aspiring to build low-cost rocket transports, and in Tesla. He’s also chairman of SolarCity, a solar panel provider he helped start.
“I just felt like, because you only live once, you may as well work on things that are going to have an important effect,” says Mr. Musk.
Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder who now is a partner at Founders Fund, one of the largest outside investors in SpaceX, says the country needs more entrepreneurs like Mr. Musk who are willing to take risks.
“There aren’t very many people pursuing these sorts of hard technologies,” Mr. Thiel says, “and I think there is a sense that we need to be doing more of this as a country, as a society, if people are really going to have a better quality of life 20 years from now than they do today.”
Others see a darker side to the endless roadshow that is Mr. Musk’s life. People who know him describe him as so confident that he can achieve his goals that he sometimes speaks as if he already has.
“He’s done amazing things, but at the same time, he’s not a straight-shooter,” says Darryl Siry, Tesla’s former senior vice president for sales and marketing. “It’s a reality distortion field and it’s a powerful one. He gives the facts to fit the narrative he wants out there.”
Article Based From www.nytimes.com
