Revenge of the Electric Car

Our co-producer continues her account of shooting behind the scenes at Tesla.

As we captured key meetings with department heads,  Elon stressed his commitment to ramping Tesla up – and the fact that his role was hands-on. He reminded person after person that no problem or detail was too small. The buck stopped with Elon.

Elon Musk (left) inspects a Roadster

We pulled a marathon day, and our cameraman, Adam, worked valiantly to keep up.  Filming meetings is actually difficult to do well. You need to know the subject, know the players, and then make split-second decisions as to how to follow the action. Along the way, we captured a couple of job interviews and captured Elon’s policy of interviewing most employees in person.

One of our interviews was a young engineer. When asked about the recent layoffs he said “You have to cut your burn rate. It’s just the way business works — for start-ups especially.”

A couple of Tuesdays later, I took a cameraman back to witness an “all hands meeting” at Tesla’s Menlo Park office. Again, the back warehouse was full with cars about to be delivered. This time, we saw cars approaching VIN number 100.  Elon voiced his displeasure with an internal issue that had been passed on to the press by an employee.   Then a slide show came on, and we got a sneak peak at a photo of ‘Model S’. OMG.  I don’t usually think of sedans as sexy, but this car is gorgeous.  If and when this happens, Tesla will have trouble keeping them in stock at any price point.  My family of five might just have to be first in line.