Marshall Brain's Blog

There was a lot of coverage this week on the Tesla Roadster. Articles like this one are typical:

Electric car a shocker in speed (and sticker price)

This car is funded with $60 million raised from Silicon Valley bigwigs like Larry Page and Sergey Brin along with executives from eBay and PayPal.

The car is both impressive and useless: Impressive because it goes from zero to 60 in 4 seconds and has a 200 mile range; Useless because it costs $100K.

Wouldn't it be interesting if, instead of a $100K sports car, what we were developing were a real, useful electric car that would solve a big problem for America? Some of the features of this car would be:

• It would be a pluggable hybrid, with a battery range of perhaps 20 to 40 miles. Because of a small onboard gasoline engine and generator, it would have the same range as any "normal" gas-powered car when necessary for longer trips.
• It would be mass produced and affordable.
• It would be built on an open platform, so companies could develop new batteries, new motors, new bodies, etc. and easily attach them to the vehicle.

That third feature is essential, because it would allow the same sort of rapid advancement and commodity pricing that we see in the PC marketplace. Imagine being able to buy the car's body from one place, the motor from another, the batteries and controller from a third, and then bolt them all together to create a car that works. Hundreds of manufacturers could participate in an open marketplace and the price of cars would fall dramatically. We would also see rapid advancement. If someone developed a fuel cell to replace the battery pack, then people could switch over to it easily without having to buy a new car.

As an unexpected side-benefit, Dell could start selling cars. Maybe that would help its stock price.

This would be a great way to invest $60 million. Why didn't they go this route?