Chapter 1

This Time Could Be Different

The idea for an electric car kept JB Straubel up late one summer night in 2003. His tiny, rented house in Los Angeles brimmed that evening with members of Stanford University’s solar car team, who had just finished a race from Chicago. The biennial event was part of a growing movement to stoke interest among young engineers in developing alternatives to gas-­powered vehicles. Straubel had offered to play host to his alma mater’s team, and the grueling run left many sleeping on his floor.

Intensely focused on his own projects, Straubel had never joined the team himself during his six years at the Stanford engineering school. But his interests aligned with those of his guests: He too was obsessed by the idea of powering cars with electricity—­an interest he had held since his childhood in Wisconsin. After graduating, he had floated between LA and Silicon Valley, struggling to find his place. Straubel didn’t look like a mad scientist intent on changing the world; he had a quietness about him and the bland good looks of a midwestern frat boy. But inside, he had a gnawing desire to do more than take a job with friends at a startup like Google or join the bureaucracy of a Boeing or General Motors. He wanted to create something that changed everything, whether it was in a car or an airplane; he wanted to chase a dream.

Stanford’s team, like its competitors, had designed a car that ran on energy it collected from the sun using solar panels. Small batteries stored some of that energy—­for use at night, or else when the sun was obscured by clouds. It being a solar race, however, organizers placed limits on how batteries could be used.

Straubel thought this prohibition was misguided. Battery technology had improved dramatically in recent years, with the rise of personal electronics. He wanted to think beyond the arbitrary rules defined by competition organizers. Better batteries meant a car could run longer without relying so much on finicky solar panels and the whims of the weather. Why not emphasize battery power, whatever the source, instead of fixating on the sun?

He’d been studying a promising new type of battery that used lithium ion, first made popular by Sony in its camcorders a decade earlier before it spread to laptops and other consumer electronics. Lithium-­ion cells were lighter weight and packed more energy than most of the rechargeable batteries then on the market. Straubel knew the challenges posed by older batteries—­those lead-­acid, brick-­shaped containers were heavy, and they held comparatively little energy. He might get twenty miles of driving range out of a car before needing to find a place to recharge. With the rise of lithium-­ion batteries, however, he saw the potential for something more.

And he wasn’t alone: Among those who stayed awake with him that night was one of the Stanford team’s younger members, Gene Berdichevsky, who shared an interest in batteries. As they chatted, he grew excited about Straubel’s idea. For hours they batted ideas back and forth. If they strung thousands of small lithium-­ion batteries together to create enough energy to power a car, would they need to harvest the sun’s energy at all? They did the math to figure out how many batteries they’d need to power a car on a single charge to go from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. They sketched out a torpedo-­shaped vehicle designed for aerodynamics. With half a ton of batteries and a lightweight driver, they figured their electric car might get a range of 2,500 miles. Just imagine the attention that would get—­it was precisely the kind of stunt that could spark worldwide interest in electric cars. Animated by their conversations, Straubel suggested the team shift gears from solar power to a long-­range electric car. They could raise money from Stanford alumni.

With the sun rising in the backyard, Berdichevsky and Straubel were giddy as they began messing with lithium-­ion batteries that Straubel kept around for experiments. They fully charged finger-­length cells, then videotaped themselves as Straubel hit them with a hammer. The impact set off a reaction that ignited a fire, sending the battery tubes off like rockets. The future looked bright.

“This needs to be done,” Straubel told Berdichevsky. “We’ve got to do this.”

Jeffrey Brian Straubel had spent his childhood summers in Wisconsin rummaging through the dump to find mechanical devices to take apart. His parents indulged his curiosity, allowing their basement to be converted into a home lab. He built an electric golf cart, experimented with batteries, and became enthralled with chemistry. One evening, while in high school, he tried to decompose hydrogen peroxide to make oxygen gas, but he had forgotten that there was some leftover acetone in his flask, which resulted in an explosive mixture. It detonated into a fireball that shook the house and sent shards of glass flying. His clothes caught fire; the smoke detector blared and Straubel’s mother rushed to the basement to find her son’s face gushing blood, requiring 40 stitches. To this day, though Straubel looks the part of the earnest, baby-­faced midwesterner, a scar down his left cheek hints at something a bit more mysterious.

Straubel learned a new respect for the dangers of chemistry, leading him in 1994 to Stanford University, where he kept an interest in how energy worked, realizing a passion for the juncture between lofty science and the real-­world application of engineering. He became enamored, specifically, with energy storage and renewable energy generation, power electronics, and microcontrollers. Ironically, he dropped a class on vehicle dynamics—­he found the details surrounding a car’s suspension and the kinematics of tire movement boring.

Straubel wasn’t so much a car guy as a battery guy. His engineering brain saw an inefficiency in the world of gas-­powered cars. Petroleum was finite and burning it for energy dumped harmful carbon dioxide into the air. To him, engineering an electric vehicle wasn’t about creating a new car, per se, but addressing a crappy solution to an engineering problem. It was like being cold, spying a table in the room, and burning it for warmth. Yes, it created heat, but you were left with a room full of smoke and no table. There had to be a better way.

During his third summer of college, a professor helped land him an internship at a startup car company in Los Angeles called Rosen Motors. The company had been founded in 1993 by legendary aerospace engineer Harold Rosen and his brother Ben Rosen, a venture capitalist and chairman of Compaq Computer Corp. They envisioned a car that was nearly pollution-­free and were working to develop a hybrid-­electric powertrain. They wanted to marry a gas-­powered turbogenerator with a flywheel. Their flywheel, a spinning body that generates more and more energy the faster it spins, was designed to create the electricity needed to keep the vehicle going once the engine had started moving it.

It would be Straubel’s introduction to the car business. Harold Rosen forged a connection with him and took him under his wing. Soon, Straubel was working on the magnetic bearings for the flywheel and helping with test equipment. The summer flew by; it made Straubel realize he needed to return to Stanford for his senior year to learn more about car electronics.

Back at school, he worked remotely for Rosen until he got a call with disappointing news: the company was shutting down. It was an early lesson for Straubel in the challenges of launching a car company from scratch. Rosen Motors had burned through almost [...] million. They had installed their system in a Saturn coupe as a kind of proof of concept. (They’d torn apart a Mercedes-­Benz as well.) They promised a car that could do zero to sixty in six seconds, with the hope, ultimately, of partnering with a carmaker to implement their technology.

But even with glowing press, they couldn’t see a way forward. The joke in the auto industry has long been that to make a small fortune in the car business, start with a large one. In the company’s obituary, Ben, whose fortune came in part from a highly successful investment in Compaq, was sanguine about their effort: “There are not many chances you have in a major industry to change it and do something that’s good for society and clean up the air and reduce the use of petroleum,” he said. “It was a chance to change the world.”

Back at Stanford, Straubel rented an off-­campus house with a half-­dozen friends. Inspired by his experience that summer but suspecting that Rosen’s flywheel idea would be too challenging to implement, he took over the garage to work on converting a used Porsche 944 into a purely battery-­powered vehicle. He had some early success: His jerry-­rigged car, powered by lead-­acid batteries, was as quick as the devil, producing burnouts and a blazing quarter mile. Straubel didn’t concern himself with the handling or suspension. Instead, he focused on the car’s electronics and battery management system. That was key, trying to figure out how to juice enough power without blowing a motor or burning up the batteries. He began spending time with other like-­minded engineers in Silicon Valley, who introduced him to electric car competitions. Similar to how Henry Ford had demonstrated his abilities at the track every weekend, a hundred years earlier, Straubel and his friends took to drag racing. The trick to these races, he found, was ensuring the batteries didn’t get overheated and melt down.

As Straubel continued to tinker with electric cars, he got to know an engineer named Alan Cocconi, who had worked as a contractor on General Motor Corp.’s failed electric car called the EV1. In 1996, Cocconi’s shop, about thirty miles from downtown Los Angeles in San Dimas, was working on...