Elon Musk settled on the compact car’s name after first wanting to go with Model E—for electric, but also because it would allow his company’s vehicle lineup to spell S-E-X. His senior leadership team laughed out loud at the suggestion, but it had to be tweaked when they realized Ford held the trademark to a Model E. So “E” was reversed to “3,” which was apt for a third-generation car, but which also kind of allowed him to maintain the joke
That’s not how Apple would have named its next iPhone. But a lot of life at Tesla was different from what Doug Field had experienced at his previous employer, where he’d overseen thousands of engineers developing the newest Mac computers. It quickly became clear to him: There were things that needed to change at Tesla. If the car company was going to become mainstream, it couldn’t keep making the same mistakes it had with the Model S and Model X. The size of the company was growing too large, the stakes too great for the kinds of errors his team had been guilty of. Those delays on a mass-market car might kill the company for good. His hiring signaled that it was time for Tesla to grow up, to shed its life as a startup and mature into a corporation.
As Field settled into the company’s Palo Alto headquarters, the company’s naivete was evident. A divide that went back to the Peter Rawlinson days existed between the car guys and the tech guys. (They were all largely men.) The vehicle and manufacturing engineers—the car guys—had grown out of Rawlinson’s organization in LA, eventually relocated to Silicon Valley. They typically arrived from automakers, often European ones. Several had British accents. They ditched their suits, untucked their button-downs, went without ties. They were in their forties and fifties, living in tony Bay Area suburbs such as Pleasanton or Walnut Creek.
The tech guys came to Tesla through JB Straubel. They resembled a Silicon Valley startup, many a generation younger than their counterparts in cars, often (inevitably) Stanford alums. They favored T-shirts and fancy sneakers, lived in San Francisco or Palo Alto.
Tensions ran deep between the two factions. The car guys felt the tech guys lacked respect for the auto industry’s hard-earned lessons, for the proper way to make a car. The tech guys felt the car guys lacked their engineering skills, relying on the past as a crutch. As one executive observed about the groups: “There was not a single cultural axis on which you’d say there was alignment.
Things needed to change. Field needed them to work together if they were to going to find a way to take everything that everyone loved about the Model S and make it at a fraction of the cost. It was going to take a change of perspective. Years earlier, when engineers working on the Model S mentioned budgets to Musk, he’d lose his temper. He had wanted them to focus on making the best car possible, costs be dammed. Not now: Field had a different mandate. Tesla had proven it could make the best car. Now, Tesla’s challenge was to make an everyday car that made money—a car for everybody. That was the only way that Tesla could evolve from a wild idea into a reality.
Excerpt From Power Play - Tim Higgins.