Tesla Roadster: You Can’t Kill an Electric Car You Can’t Catch

I love Joseph B. White … or anyone, really, who can turn out catchy phrases. My husband is a genius at that. Me, not so much. While writing this article for the Wall Street Journal, Joe came up with the catchiest slogan of all for the company that embodies the luxury and style that can be the electric car. Yep, I’m talking again about the Tesla Roadster, and Joe’s bringing us some of the reasons they’re so behind schedule:

During an interview last week in his modest office in one of the nondescript warehouses Tesla occupies in the San Francisco suburb of San Carlos, [company co-founder Martin Eberhard] says he has gained respect for the challenges that conventional auto makers face.

Among the problems Tesla has encountered: The car’s body had to be redesigned because the door sills were so high that getting in and out of the vehicle required excessive acrobatics, especially for women in skirts.

A supplier for the car’s original transmission failed, and a subsequent decision to move from a one-speed transmission to a two-speed proved more difficult to execute than expected. In August, the car flunked a 30 mile per hour side-impact crash test, necessitating more last-minute design changes.

The logistics of getting components produced in Thailand, Taiwan, and the U.S. to arrive at the right time at the assembly plant in England have proven challenging. To manage this effort, Tesla in September hired Michael Marks, former chief executive officer of contract manufacturing giant Flextronics International Ltd. to become its CEO, replacing Mr. Eberhard, who remained as president of technology.

“Silicon Valley engineers find it easy to think they know everything and Rust Belt companies don’t know anything,” Mr. Eberhard says. “More often than not the knee jerk reaction, that these guys (in Detroit) don’t know what they are doing, is wrong.”

At a time when most people blame the lack of options today on the big auto manufacturers secret schemes at staying dependent upon foreign oil, Mr. Eberhard does blame carmakers … but for making bad decisions:

That said, Mr. Eberhard says conventional car makers did get it wrong on electric vehicle technology in the 1990s and early years of this decade.

Big car makers, led by General Motors Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp., responded to a California mandate in the late ’90s by producing vehicles that were supposed to prove that electric vehicles could be affordable and oh-so-politically correct. Unfortunately, the GM EV1 and the electric Toyota RAV4 struck mainstream customers as geeky, slow and impractical.

“Electric cars had a terrible black eye,” Mr. Eberhard says. As far as the general public was concerned, “they sucked and they were dead.“

There are people who would argue vehemently with that last statement, but they would be few and far between. The general public needs cars that work well, not just cars that are good for the environment, and it looks like Tesla is bound and determined to take us all the way there.