Tesla’s original co-founder, Martin Eberhard, is disapointed that Elon Musk canceled Tesla’s $25,000 electric car program and made a “dumpster-looking” truck instead.
There’s a lot of confusion around who founded Tesla.
Most people sinply 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 ran into issues bringing the Roadster, its first vehicle, to production, and Eberhard and Musk blamed each others for those issues. Ultimately, Musk was able to kick Eberhard out of the company as he was the largest shareholders and controled the board.
They sued each others and ultiamtely, a court settlement resulted in Musk being able to call himself a co-founder of Tesla, along with early employees Ian Wright and JB Straubel.
Musk has been infamously bitter about this decision and claimed that only Straubel should have been able to call himself co-founder along with him. That’s even though Eberhard and Tarpenning founded Tesla the year prior to Musk getting 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 embeded first principle engineering into the company. They had alreayd planned for Tesla to make the Roadster, and then higher volume premium vehicles, which turned out to be the Model S/X, and then more mass-market models, which turned out to be 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 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 dispointed 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 previosuly reported, this is not the ‘Model 2’, which is often the name that people used to referred 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 crititze 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 literally called a dumpster.
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