December 28, 2007
If Silicon Valley built a car…
… it would crash repeatedly for no obvious reason, refuse to restart until you rebooted the engine, then lock you out until you simultaneously pulled the handle, turned the key and yanked on the radio antenna.
OK, so this was originally a joke told at Microsoft’s expense, but it also points to a truism about a development process widely favoured in the Valley: ship products before they are ready, then rely on rapid improvements to bring them up to scratch. Now it seems that Silicon Valley upstart Tesla Motors is doing its level best to keep the old joke alive.
The electric car company set up by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk (we profiled him earlier this week) has been struggling for some time to produce an advanced transmission for its hotly anticipated sports car. Rather than put off the launch of its first vehicle yet again, it has now opted for a familiar Valley alternative: a beta version.
This is how new Tesla CEO Ze’ev Drori explains it in a blog post this week:
To help speed delivery of cars, we will begin production in 2008 with an interim transmission design. These transmissions will meet high standards for reliability and durability, but the car will not meet the original performance spec for acceleration, reaching 60 mph in 5.7 seconds instead of the promised 4 seconds. When the final transmission is ready, we will retrofit all cars, at Tesla’s expense, to meet the promised performance specifications.
Valley luminaries like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who top the Tesla waiting list, shouldn’t mind - they know all about putting out products before they are ready (In fact Google Product Search, formerly known as Froogle, is still in beta after more than five years, which must go down as some sort of record.)
