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CNET News.com's Editor-at-Large, Michael Kanellos, has interviewed Tesla Motors chairman Elon Musk, and we've got bits of their convo on the future of electric cars and biofuels.
Musk's story is certainly unusual. After dropping out of a graduate program in physics in California's Stanford University after two days, he formed the company Zip2, which Compaq later bought for £150mn. He went on to help found PayPal and make a second fortune, and now, he's the founder of Space Exploration Technologies, which puts satellites into orbit.
He's also chairman of electric car company Tesla Motors and Solar City, a rapidly growing solar panel installer. He also has five kids, all under the age of five. Oh, and he's under 40. But rather than coming across as a frantic whirlwind of energy, he comes across as cerebral, precise, and calm. You'd think his only obligation for the day is grading final exams.
Keep reading for some of the highlights from Michael Kanellos' interview with Musk.
Michael Kanellos: First off, I think everyone wants to know how does the Tesla Roadster drive?
Elon Musk: I would say it's great. According to one of the car magazines, either Car & Driver or AutoWeek, it's apparently the best kind of mid-speed acceleration of any car they ever tested. So that's perfect for when you're driving on the highway and you want to make a lane change or something like that. It's incredibly responsive, so it's a very, very fun car to drive.
MK: You haven't been hit or scraped it yet?
EM: No, I just basically drive from Tesla (in San Carlos, California) to Palo Alto. I drove a little bit around Stanford and I picked up an anniversary gift for my wife on University Avenue.
MK: You've proven that electric cars are viable and you've brought the concept back from the past. It seems the most interesting intellectual aspects of the challenge have been accomplished. Why don't you sell the company?
EM: Well, my motivation behind Tesla is really to do as much good as possible for the environment and the electric-vehicle revolution. I think there is still a lot of work to do and if we were to sell to a big company, I'm not sure it would progress at the same pace.
MK: You see awfully big auto companies now putting a lot more emphasis on electric and hybrids. Do you think they are serious? In the past, people have accused them of doing these projects for window-dressing.
EM: I think it depends on the company. Toyota is really very serious about hybrids and GM is, I think, pretty serious. The tide of history is really becoming difficult to avoid. It's really very much in the direction of hybrid and also for electric vehicles.
I should say our focus right now is very much on the Roadster and ramping up the production rate, making sure our supply chain is secure, ensuring that the variable cost of the car is kept low, so that we get quite good margins, and making sure we don't have our overhead grow out of control. What Tesla is focused on right now is producing a compelling car at a compelling price and making sure that the business fundamentals are good.
MK: What do you think of all the money going to biofuels? Do you think biofuel will be able stand a chance against electric?
EM: It depends on the biofuel application. I think for high-value applications like jet fuel, it makes a lot more sense than it does for cars. Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.
MK: What about cellulose?
EM: That's certainly a possibility. It's obviously tricky to convert cellulose to a useful biofuel. I think actually the most efficient way to use cellulose is to burn it in a co-generation power plant. That will yield the most energy and that is something you can do today.
But in general, crops are not a very efficient way of turning sunlight into mobile energy. A solar panel from SunPower is probably 20 to 22 per cent efficient, but if you look at the actual efficiency of plants, if you take the sunlight incidence and then how much of that gets converted into plant matter and then what it takes to take that plant matter and convert it into ethanol or some other energy source, it actually ends up being well under one per cent efficient. I mean, in some cases 0.1 per cent.
Another way to think about it is: the current cultivated land is what's needed to provide food for about six billion people. The energy used by a car is much greater than a person. A person might use 3,000 calories in a day, but a car would use 300,000. Cars take a lot more energy than people do.
Photo: Tesla Motors
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