Re: More
Well, the Vanity Fair article offers some version of the history:
Quiet Thunder
""
For all their success, not everyone at Tesla felt the car was on the right course. Ian Wright, 51, Tesla's first head of vehicle development, is a New Zealand–born computer engineer and amateur racer who signed on almost as soon as the company was founded. He'd even helped make the original pitch to Elon Musk, joining Eberhard on that fateful trip to SpaceX. Wright loved the Roadster. He just didn't feel that Musk's grand scheme of producing cheaper follow-ons made sense. "I didn't want to go the route of family cars," Wright explains. "I want even higher performance."
Wright's point is that most Americans spend no more than $2,000 on gas a year. How much of a premium would they pay for an E.V. that saved them $1,000 a year in fuel costs? Would they buy a $30,000 car, let alone a $50,000 one, that did that? Perhaps some would, he concedes. But wouldn't they be the ones who would have bought a Prius hybrid instead? And if so, what was the difference between a Prius that got 50 miles per gallon and an E.V. that got the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon? A mere doubling of the efficiency of a modest number of cars. "So replacing the Prius with an E.V.," Wright argued, "doesn't solve the problem."
Better, Wright said, to make even higher-performance E.V.'s to replace ever higher-performance gas cars. If Wright could replace 10,000 high-performance gas cars that got 10 miles per gallon with high-performance E.V.'s that got 100 miles per gallon, that would be meaningful. "It's certainly true that gas will get more expensive and batteries will get cheaper, and eventually you'll get a mass market," Wright argued. "But in the meantime the answer is high performance."
So Wright left to design his own two-seat racecar, the Wrightspeed X1. He says it accelerates from 0 to 60 in three seconds. But it's still a concept car in search of an angel. "We were very lucky finding Elon at Tesla," Wright says. "You can't always get that kind of luck, and in fact I haven't."
""
