The transport sector is responsible for 30% of total CO2 emissions in Europe, of which 72% is
produced by road transport alone; electric cars must be more and more common in everyday life
and not the exception.
Tesla Motors is one of the biggest car company which produces electric vehicles and car spare
parts for other car companies. Founded in 2003, Tesla aims at mass production and general
innovation in the world of cars and home automation. A large part of population uses cars with
petrol or hybrid engines, which leads to significant pollutant emissions; for this reason the mission
of Tesla is very important. Making “the electrical” part of our everyday life is one of the main
goals of Tesla.
Tesla, whose name was inspired by the American inventor NIkola Tesla, was founded in Jun 2003
by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. They invested their financial savings in creating the
society, but quickly they found an important partner, Elon Musk( the brain behind Paypal, Spacex
and SolarCity ).
Musk started the first financing, he was able to raise funds for more than 150 millions euros in
less than 5 years. Musk became the Tesla’ s CEO (Chief Executive Officer) in 2008 and in 2021 has
become the richest man in the world.
In June 2010 they arrived on Wall Street , thanks to the IPO( Initial Public Offering) Tesla Motors
raised funds for more than 160 million euros.
In spite of a drop of quotes (for a fire of a Model S), Tesla won the “Gold Palm” for the best title of
Nasdaq100 2013.
In the following years Tesla continued to grow up, selling more than 30 thousand electric cars in
2014 and more than 50 thousand electric cars in 2015. Then they improved their production of
“Model S” and “Model X” arriving to 1800 vehicles, more than 60 thousand units in 2016.
The peak production arrived with “Tesla Model III”, a low cost electric car(start to 35000$); during
the introduction week Tesla reached 200 thousand pre-orders.
Another important introduction in the Tesla’s world is “Gigafactory”(a factory that is able to
produce 500.000 batteries a year).
Today Tesla represents the most quoted automotive company on the stock exchange.
TECHNOLOGY
From a technological point of view, the most important characteristic about their vehicles is the
type of battery used to accumulate Energy.
Other car companies use “single-purpose” storage cells( cells used only by car companies), Tesla
uses batteries composed by thousands of lithium-ion cells 18650. These kinds of batteries are
cylindrical and small and we could find them in our laptop or in other electronic devices.
