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What’s Tesla and when did it start making cars?
Elon Musk did not found Tesla. How about that? In fact, Tesla was founded on 1 July 2003 in Palo Alto, California by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. The former was Tesla’s first chairman and CEO, with Musk coming onboard as chairman in 2004 along with a boatload of cash he made inventing PayPal.
Tesla didn’t build its first car in 2003, though, or in 2004. In fact, no new car wore the Tesla badge until the Lotus Elise-based Tesla Roadster arrived in 2008. Tesla’s first bespoke car, the Model S saloon, finally went into production in summer 2012.
Eberhard was sacked by the board in 2007, with two further CEOs unable to stem the flow of money going in the wrong direction. Elon Musk took over as CEO in October 2008, and pulled off a string of cash-based coups with carmaker Daimler taking a 10 per cent stake, the US Dept of Energy lending money and Musk’s one-man hype machine ensuring the firm’s stock listing went well in 2010.
Recent years have been more stable – the company has a reasonable range of decent cars, even if new product is taking a little while to reach the market and the firm managed its first four straight quarters of profit in 2019/20.
Tesla’s greatest hits
01 Tesla Model 3
The first Model 3 rolled off Tesla’s production lines in July 2017, the first truly accessible Tesla available
