The hiring of former Mazdas ing. will not bring Tesla anything in substance.
Its a marketing gag only.
This might be hard to digest for the Tesla-fanboys - but thats it, sober seen
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The move to highjack / bribe a otherwise renown designer is nothing more then dressing up the company for sale or IPO to the applauding claqueur / laymen.
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To make my point clear - the setup for the carbon fiber and fibre glass body parts ALONE, of a Tesla is neither a easy nor trivial matter. Not speaking of the many other parts for which tools would have to be custom build before even thinking of assembling a own car is a logistic and technical task of enormous proportions. simply Tesla cannot handle that today and will not in the future.
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What Tesla inc, especially because of the cultivated founder Martin Eberhard, have indeed accomplished so far is a huge marketing success.
Assisted by luck for having been exactly at the right time (oil bubble) around - but especially at disguising & selling a 99% foreign-importet-pre-finished good as american invention / product.
Finkenbusch, you are starting to sound like the commenters that I like to call "eurosnobs" (the "selling a 99% foreign-importet-pre-finished good as american invention / product" part).
On the other points, sure, hiring the Mazda designer also brings good marketing, but the primary reason is to design cars. You don't hire a designer just for a short marketing stint, you hire one to design cars.
As for making the car using a lot of ready made foreign parts, so what? Pretty much all car companies do that today. Fact of the matter is despite all the delays, Tesla still made the first production electric sports car in the world. Even Venturi has to wait until 2009 to release their's, the Lightning also isn't anywhere near ready yet (judging by how slow it was going in the video they released). Hey, if someone else can do it better, then that's great, but so far it's still Tesla right now.
As others mentioned, the Whitestar will be using more conventional body materials so it shouldn't be much of a challenge to make the body.
Anyways, I like the Furai design and the Sky design (don't care much for the Solstice, for similar reasons as tonybelding), so I'm thinking this guy might make some good designs for the Model S or the future hatchback, which is why I started this thread. As for whether Tesla can to produce a Model S, it's something we'll all see in the future, but is it really necessary to step on Tesla in every single one of your posts?
