Tesla’s original co-founder, Martin Eberhard, is disappointed that Elon Musk canceled Tesla’s $25,000 electric car program and instead developed a “dumpster-looking” truck.
There’s a lot of confusion around who founded Tesla.
Most people simply believe that it is Elon Musk since he has been the face of the company for almost two decades.
Musk is allowed to call himself a co-founder of Tesla through a court settlement along with 4 other people: Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning, Ian Wright, and JB Straubel.
However, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning were the two original co-founders.
Earlier this year, we went through Tesla’s entire founding story to set the record clean, but in short, Eberhard and Tarpenning led Tesla for the first 5 years of the company with Musk being an investor and chairman for 4 of those years.
Tesla encountered difficulties bringing the Roadster, its first vehicle, to production, and Eberhard and Musk blamed each other for these issues. Ultimately, Musk was able to remove Eberhard from the company, as he was the largest shareholder and controlled the board.
They sued each other, and ultimately, a court settlement resulted in Musk being able to claim the title of co-founder of Tesla, alongside early employees Ian Wright and JB Straubel.
Musk has been notoriously bitter about this decision and claimed that only Straubel should have been able to call himself a co-founder alongside him. That’s even though Eberhard and Tarpenning founded Tesla the year before Musk got involved in the first round of investment.
We previously highlighted how Tesla owes much of its success to Eberhard and Tarpenning, who laid out the plan for Tesla early and embedded first-principle engineering into the company. They had already planned for Tesla to produce the Roadster, followed by higher-volume premium vehicles, which ultimately became the Model S/X, and then more mass-market models, which eventually became the Model 3 and Model Y.
Eberhard recently gave a rare interview in which he commented about Tesla:
During the interview, the Tesla co-founder discussed how Model 3/Y were in the early part of Tesla’s business plan, but he then added that the goal was to continue to go down market after that.
He is disappointed that Tesla went the other way:
I am actually disapointed that Tesla cancled its low-end car program because that’s what the world needs – not a truck that looks like a dumspter.
Kim Java asked him about the ‘Robotaxi Model 2’ and Eberhard responded that he is “skeptical” about that.
She was likely referring to the ‘Cybercab’ here, but as we previously reported, this is not the ‘Model 2’, which is often the name that people used to refer to the planned “$25,000 Tesla.”
As Eberhard said, this program was canceled by Tesla. Despite Tesla’s team reportedly fighting to make it, Musk decided to kill the program in favor of the Cybercarb and making cheaper versions of the existing Model Y and Model 3.
Without mentioning Tesla directly, Eberhard appeared to criticize Tesla’s approach to self-driving:
People are overlooking the failure of these autonomous systems too easily. You can put the prototype of something on the road and kill people sometimes because it doesn’t work correctly, and that’s kind of OK? It’s not for me.
During the interview, the Tesla co-founder also criticized the company’s latest car designs as being uninspired on top of the Cybertruck, which he called a dumpster.
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