When I saw Elon Musk on Jay Leon’s Garage trying to imply there was more than one production Tesla, and the one you see is not the only one in the world, i sort of cringed. Then he said charge time was three hours on 120v, which is not true at all and never was. It is three hours but on a special 220v circuit.

That made me worry a bit for Tesla, because I still love the concept and think it’s the greatest idea since buttered toast :-).

Was Martin also fired because he didn’t like the hybrid drivetrain idea I know Musk was going to use for Whitestar?

D

The reliability issues were with the Magna unit only. We’ve established the fact that the units delivered were not working well so that led to a disagreement between the parties as to what was owed on the contract. These types of disagreements sometimes end up in court.

Regarding the one speed vs. two speed thing – only recently did new technology (new types of IGBTs) become available to enable us to flow enough current through the inverter to generate the necessary torque to achieve the 0-60 spec using a single gear ratio. Once that was available, the decision was obvious. Prior to that, we needed mechanical gearing to achieve the spec of acceleration and top speed.

Regarding production, the fourth production vehicle off the line will be in Monaco with me next week before it come back to the US and is delivered to its owner. The cars are built in Hethel but then they are shipped to the US. That takes time.

I’m completely surprised. We can make automatic transmissions that’ll take many thousands of foot-pounds of torque, and while they are generally quite heavy they also tend to contain far more than two ratios.

I’m a huge fan of electric motors (but not batteries, so I’m holding out for fuel cells), and part of that is the simplicity of direct-drive.

Still whats up with the current production delay? I know Tesla said they were slowly ramping up but 0 cars in 1 month?

Simple: transmissions are a tried-and-true technology that have been around for a long time, so the decision-makers likely assumed that the transmission wouldn’t be a problem compared to the other components.

Frankly, I’m surprised people aren’t more surprised by this. If it were the batteries that were the problem, folks would be saying “of course, batteries are HARD!” but who would have put money down two years ago that the transmission would be the holdup?

This is a bit off topic and I don’t want to put you on the spot but since you work for GM transmission engineering perhaps you can enlighten me “Why does GM continue to build 4 sp transmissions? I presume they are cheaper to manufacture. However I (and I suspect many others) will not even look at a car with a 4 sp tranny. A lot of no-sales on that account alone can be costly.

especially when people criticize GM (which designs, makes and sells millions of 4,5,6 spd transmissions) saying if Tesla can make a li-ion EV why can’t GM

and yes….I work for GM transmission engineering