Tesla Wouldn’t Exist If It Weren’t For This Man And This Car

Alan Cocconi isn’t a household name like Elon Musk is, but to anyone involved in the early days of the modern EV revolution, he certainly is. His legendary electric roadster — the tzero — inspired the formation of Tesla as we know it. I had a chance to look at the machine, and the Petersen Automotive museum had a chance to interview the man; let’s take a look and listen.

Our friends at the Petersen Automotive Museum now have a tzero on display, but they invited me over to take a peek before it hit the floor. At the time, I didn’t fully realize the gravity of what I was standing next to; in many way, it looks unimpressive — like a bright yellow, hand-made kit-car.

Little did I know I was standing next to a legend.

 

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Anyone who was working in the electric car space in the 1990s or 2000s had some connection to AC propulsion. Hell, I was doing an electric car conversion in college in 2012 — just before Tesla became a mainstream automaker — and even our team was chatting with AC Propulsion for information on the motor we were using (a motor we’d sourced from BMW’s Mini-E). The company was founded by Cocconi, and was involved in all sorts of electric vehicle powertrain development throughout the years; I already mentioned the Mini-E, but there was also the legendary GM Impact concept (which became the EV-1) and of course the Tesla Roadster. (There was also the eBox, a converted Scion xB, but it didn’t really make it into mainstream consciousness).

AC propulsion didn’t develop the Tesla Roadster entirely, but it was a key part of it. More importantly, the tzero was the vehicle’s inspiration. The book Tesla Motors: How Elon Musk and Company Made Electric Cars Cool, and Sparked the Next Tech Revolution gets into the early days of the now larger-than-life, Musk-led company. From a book excerpt on Cleantechnica:

Tom Gage [who joined Cocconi at AC Propulsion and became CEO] met Martin Eberhard in 2002. “We were just getting involved in converting the tzero over to lithium-ion batteries,” Gage told me. “He put some money into AC Propulsion and we finished this conversion of the tzero. We drove it from LA up to San Francisco with only one stop, so it was obviously getting much better range with the reduced weight and increased capacity of the lithium-ion batteries, which had replaced the lead-acid batteries. Martin was pretty impressed. In November 2003, I remember going to the LA Auto Show with him and he started talking up Tesla, saying he wanted to convert a Lotus Elise, and that was sort of the start of it right then.”

AC Propulsion was in dire financial straits at that moment. Eberhard’s $100,000 investment was very welcome, and gave the team the funds they needed to develop the lithium-ion-based tzero. “Martin borrowed the tzero in 2004 for about three months,” said Gage. “He took it up to northern California and used it to woo investors, show them what he was talking about and that it could really be done. I think it was pretty key in getting the company off the ground.”

[…]

Gage and company thought the [Scion xB-based] eBox had a better chance at being commercialized, but Musk and Eberhard were interested in the sexier tzero. “Martin asked ‘Are you going to build my car? How’s the progress going?’ I told him we weren’t going to build any more tzeros. So that to some degree was the impetus for him to get into the business (if you’re not going to build it, I’ll build my own).” Eberhard and his partners decided to build their own electric sports car, and in May 2004 they signed a license agreement to use AC Propulsion’s powertrain technology.

Martin Eberhard loved fast cars, but was concerned about climate change and the country’s dependence on Middle East oil. He was one of the early adopters who leased an EV1, and he was as angry as anyone when the company took the cars back and crushed them. However, his real electrical epiphany came about on a drive through Palo Alto, where he saw stylish performance cars like BMWs and Mercedes parked next to sensible “dork-mobiles” or “punishment cars,” as he called them, such as the Toyota Prius…

In time, Tesla launched its first car, which Car and Driver describes as basically a re-skinned tzero:

Tesla Motors began production in 2008 with the Roadster, the first generation of which could be fairly described as an AC Propulsion tzero with the kit-car bits replaced by one-grade-above-kit-car Lotus Elise components. Later models (like the 2011 Roadster 2.5 shown here) use proprietary drivetrain technology developed at Tesla, but the first run depended on a licensed AC Propulsion power system and reductive charging systems.

It’s worth noting that the details of Tesla’s early days are disputed and were the subject of a lawsuit involving Musk and Eberhard, but here’s what Cocconi said in a Caltech interview:

He’s not the one who started Tesla. It was Martin Eberhard who started Tesla. Elon Musk, in my opinion, his main skill is getting other people’s money. He does that very well, so that enabled him to scale up and create what is now known as Tesla. But I don’t think he had vision other than recognizing that the technology was available, and Martin Eberhard had started doing the Tesla Roadster on his own, with his efforts, but didn’t have the financial resources to take it to the level that was required. That’s where Elon Musk came in. I don’t give Elon Musk a whole lot of credit for technological insight other than recognizing viable technologies when he sees them.

Let’s Take A Step Back

The tzero, whose name stands for the beginning of time (the term is used in engineering frequently), really is fitting now that we look back on it, as it did represent the start of arguably the very first true automotive revolution since cars became mainstream in the early 20th century.

Watch The Petersen Automotive Museum’s interview above, and you’ll see that Cocconi talks about how he started out as a power electronics engineer after graduating from Caltech and how he worked with defense contractor AeroVironment on the GM Sunraycer. This was a hugely important car in its own right, so we’ll pause here briefly.

The National Museum of American History has a nice writeup of the Sunraycer solar car:

In 1987, General Motors, 16 GM subsidiaries, and an AeroVironment, Inc. engineering team led by company founder and famed aeronautical engineer Paul MacCready designed the GM Sunraycer to compete in the first World Solar Challenge in Australia. The team combined lightweight materials, solar power technology, and cutting edge power management systems to create this energy efficient speedster. Sunraycer’s photovoltaic solar cells converted the sun’s radiation into electricity to power its motor and charge the battery. Gallium arsenide cells make up 80 percent of the solar arrays, and single crystal silicon cells comprise the remaining 20 percent. The chassis was constructed of aluminum tubing, and the lightweight body was made of two Kevlar layers sandwiching a layer of Numex. The race began on November 1, 1987; the route was a 1,950-mile north-to-south transcontinental course starting in Darwin and ending in Adelaide. Sunraycer won the challenge by completing the route in 5 1/4 days with a running time of 44.9 hours and an average speed of 41.6 miles per hour. Ford’s Sunchaser finished second, 2 1/2 days and over 620 miles behind Sunraycer.

What’s most important is that the Sunraycer solar-car was such a good look for GM that AeroVironment was able to sell GM on the idea of the 1990 Impact concept, a much more viable, daily-drivable EV than had ever come before — one that ultimately became the EV1, which was one of the early sparks in the EV revolution (even if it was extinguished too soon). From the National Museum of American History:

After the race, Sunraycer went on a national tour of auto shows, museums, and schools to promote interest among students in alternative energy technology and engineering careers. When the tour ended, GM donated Sunraycer to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Using lessons learned from the World Solar Challenge, GM and AeroVironment collaborated on the development of the GM Impact battery-powered electric car. Sunraycer provided new insights into how driver activity, power consumption, battery life, and range interact. The Impact was the prototype for the EV1, GM’s first electric production car. AeroVironment carried the research and development from Sunraycer, Impact, and EV1 into other technologies, including rapid battery charging systems and power processing systems used to test and develop electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles, and batteries. Sunraycer laid the theoretical and practical foundation that made modern electric and hybrid vehicles practical for everyday transportation.

Cocconi handled the propulsion system power electronics, including the motor and gearbox design, transferring the tech from the Impact to Hughes Aircraft Company, which was doing the production development for successor, the EV1. This, Cocconi says in The Petersen’s interview, felt like the end of his role there on that GM project, so he started his own R&D company: AC Propulsion.

Cocconi focused on optimizing one good drivetrain, which he put into various demos vehicles, including ones for VW, Volvo, and Honda. Then, in the mid 1990s, AC Propulsion decided it wanted something a bit sexier to get the word out about the company. “We realized we’d like to have a vehicle that drew more attention than just a converted Honda Civic or a VW Bug,” Coccini says in the video.

So — after seeing the Piontek Sportech in an issue of Road & Track — the company bought one and converted it to electric propulsion. And thus came the tzero that inspired the Tesla Roadster.

Note that it’s probably worth doing an entire article on Piontek, becase Dave Piontek was just a guy in Canton, Michigan who wanted to build his own sports car. The idea that AC Propulsion saw an article about the homebrew car, ask Piontek for a chassis, and then use that to build an electric car that could, in its ultimate form,  do 0-60 MPH in 3.6 seconds with a range of 300 miles at 65 mph — and ultimately inspire a sea-change in the auto industry – is amazing.

You’ll notice that the tzero has its own unique trailer. “The only way to get more range was to get a range extender,” Cocconi says in The Petersen’s video, noting that it was a 500cc Kawasaki motor that offered 30 MPG all day long at 80 mph. What another profound bit of foreshadowing, as the industry is now heading towards range extenders.

Cocconi gets into how the first versions of the tzero Optima lead-acid batteries, how his team had to modify the Piontek chassis to make it work, some of the engineering challenges it faced — it’s a fantastic bit of automotive history and an interview worth watching.

I come away amazed at how much of an impact (pun intended) this one person had on not just the auto industry, but I think ultimately on human civilization. One geeky Caltech engineer changed the world.

Yes, it’s hilarious that AC Propulsion decided it wanted to pursue an electric Scion xB instead of a sports car, especially when the company clearly understood that an attractive car was one that would get more interest (that was the point of the tzero). Still, even if Tesla came away richer and more successful after launching its sports car and putting together its own company of geeks, Cocconi, AC Propulsion, and the tzero will always be the ones who started it all.

Check out the Petersen Automotive Museum to see this true automotive icon for yourself!

Images: Petersen Automotive Museum unless otherwise stated