playnext.fm

Land of the Giants · Vulture

The Electric Car Goes Mainstream

July 26, 2023·30 min·2 clips
The tent outside the Fremont factory that saved the Model 3 and put Tesla on a 5,000-cars-a-week path.
Rappers made Tesla audible first. Around Los Angeles, Arthur Dreesen heard the brand floating through studios before owning one felt realistic. The signal was status. Model Ss sat beside BMWs and Audis, futuristic enough to become the car people noticed in that world. For Dreesen, the draw was not mainly environmental virtue. It was technology, status, and wanting the thing. Then aspiration ran into price. A $100,000 car could make Tesla desirable from a distance, but it could not make electric driving feel normal. The Model 3 changed that. Tesla wanted a $35,000 car, which meant facing the battery problem directly. Suppliers would not be enough. Lithium ion batteries were expensive, scarce, and tied to whether an affordable electric vehicle could exist at all. Ryan Melsert describes a moment when Tesla seemed to need all the cells being made in the world. So Tesla pulled the work inside. At the Gigafactory, Panasonic would make cells in the same operation where Tesla worked on the motor and battery pack. It started rough. Melsert says the design headquarters was a trailer propped up on bricks. By 2016, the building was running. But scale did not mean the cells were vehicle ready, or that the powertrain was cheap enough. Tesla was trying to launch a new car and a new manufacturing system at the same time.

As heard by us

A clear look at Tesla's path from cultural symbol to manufacturing machine.

Tesla's rise is framed less as a product story than as a status machine that caught on. It starts with rappers, parking lots, and the moment a sleek Model S became shorthand for cool, then pulls back to the harder problem underneath: making an electric car cheap enough, fast…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Want the story behind Tesla's rise from status symbol to the Model 3 push?

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
Listen to the show on
Apple PodcastsSpotify
Play clips from this episodeMore from Land of the Giants