The five co-founders of Tesla — Marc Tarpenning, Martin Eberhard, Elon Musk, JB Straubel, and Ian Wright — were certainly greenies, and the environmental value of EVs was one of their prime motivators. However, they were also rocket scientists and sports car connoisseurs, and they were well aware of another exciting advantage of electric powertrains. Unlike a dinosaur-burning engine, an electric motor delivers maximum torque from the moment you step on the pedal, delivering performance that not even the most exclusive of gas-powered sports cars can match.
Tom Gage and Paul Carosa, working for a company called AC Propulsion, had taken full advantage of this instant torque to build the tzero, a car that had a magic power: anyone who drove it instantly changed their opinion of electric cars. This was the rock that Musk and his Musketeers planned to build their company on. The Tesla team made a deal with AC Propulsion to license its motor and inverter technology, and started work on what would become the revolutionary Roadster.
The tzero’s performance was impressive, but as the Tesla team worked with it, they found that there was a lot of room for improvement. JB Straubel and his team of engineers ended up redesigning almost every part.
AC Propulsion had produced 60 drivetrains or something like that, all hand-crafted,” Marc Tarpenning told me. “Each motor was matched with each inverter and they were all hand-tuned. This is not manufacturing, this is high-end hobbyist. We [licensed their motor] and we realized they couldn’t manufacture it, so we just designed our own motor which, in the end, was quite a bit different from what we started with.”
According to Tarpenning, the Tesla team moved on from AC Propulsion’s motor pretty early in the game. “We redesigned it a year before we were in production. We did need one for the mule [the first test vehicle]. But that was long before we were even into the engineering prototypes, let alone the validation prototypes, which then lead into production.”
The AC Propulsion guys, who didn’t get to ride the Tesla rocket to fame and fortune, remember things a little differently. Paul Carosa told me that Tesla “stopped paying royalties halfway through the Roadster production, claiming that they were no longer using our technology, which was not clear. If you look at the Roadster motor and the power modules, it’s essentially our technology there. I don’t think the relationship ended on a good note.”
Tom Gage: “I think they paid a license for the first five hundred vehicles, and then there was a change in design which they claimed eliminated their reliance on our licensed technology. There was never any real discussion of what they had changed. It was hardball, but that’s the way they do things in the auto industry.”
The way that the patents and the contract were written, it would have been difficult to prove that Tesla did anything wrong, and AC Propulsion didn’t want to get into a legal battle. “After all was said and done, our patent wasn’t as clear as it should’ve been,” said Gage. “So, [a lawsuit] would’ve made the lawyers rich but probably nobody
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