Alumni Profile

Alumnus engineers supercharged electric car with racetrack speed, style

The Tesla Roadster, a new electric car designed for power and performance, is impressive enough that Time Magazine named it one of the best inventions of 2006. The company that makes it, Tesla Motors, is headquartered in San Carlos, Calif., less than 15 miles from campus.

Dave Lyons (MS 1990 ME, MBA 2001) is Tesla’s director of engineering and one of 26 Stanford Engineering alumni at the company. He gave this interview just after he and fellow alumnus Dan Adamas (MS 1991 ME) spoke to ME Professor David Beach’s “Good Products, Bad Products” class.

What’s your role at Tesla?

I focus on the propulsion systems, also called the drivetrain, for our vehicles—everything that is “EV” about the car. That’s the battery pack, the motor, the power electronics and the two-speed transmission, which is a custom design for Tesla products.

What makes this electric car so powerful?

Electric vehicles are not inherently slow things like some people believe - in fact, quite the opposite is true. The three-phase, AC induction motor that we’ve developed, is quite an amazing machine because it can provide its full torque at zero RPMs. The instant you touch the pedal you have access to full torque if you desire and that leads to incredible acceleration. In an internal combustion vehicle the motor needs to spin up to speed to produce adequate torque, but in the Tesla powertrain there is no lag in power or revving and releasing the clutch. In addition, the power band, or the range of speeds at high torque, is much wider on our electric motor than on an internal combustion engine so we don’t need to provide as many gearing options in the transmission. You can take our Roadster from 0 to 60 in first gear and get there in under four seconds. Then you shift into second for freeway speeds and can take it up to 130 mph —on the track, of course.

What are some of the other cool engineering aspects of the car?

Outside of the powertrain, we focus a great deal of effort on reduction of mass and improvement of aerodynamics. One important thing we did to reduce mass was to build the entire chassis of aluminum. The chassis is constructed from aluminum extrusions that are CNC-machined and then bonded together with a technology originally developed in the aerospace industry. The result is an incredibly stiff yet light frame with very low capital and tooling investment. The styling and body efforts for the Roadster took great care to minimize the the drag coefficient times the frontal area of the vehicle. We used computational fluid dynamics and scale model wind-tunnel testing to optimize our aerodynamic signature with minimum compromise to styling. That iterative process enabled us to design a car that requires much less power to push down the road and still looks beautiful.

Is making an electric car a dream you always had? How did you get involved with Tesla?

I can’t say that the love of electric cars has been the focus of my professional attention. But one of the things I have focused on is being involved with really innovative teams of people trying to solve hard problems and working toward great solutions. Out of Stanford I went to work for a consultancy that at that point was called David Kelley Design, soon to become IDEO. I spent 11 years there and worked to help IDEO’s clients innovate and solve all sorts of really difficult engineering and business problems. I became an engineering generalist who enjoyed working deep in the trenches on a problem but also enjoyed spreading my wings and staying as broad in my interests as possible. Design consulting exposes you to a broad scope of work and teaches the important skill of keeping your solutions in context.

What do you enjoy about your work, in particular?

Like all engineers, I’m a problem solver and this is a really hard problem to solve. Our EV technology is proven, but the real challenge for our team is to strike the balance between performance and cost without the sales volumes and vast resources of a large automobile company. We like to say that we have to do “more with less.” And we get to do it with some really bright people. We are working on something that feels incredibly important and timely. If you look at some of things I learned in classes like Organizational Behavior, I’d rate the task importance and the task variety at my job both at 10. It’s a fulfilling job and it doesn’t hurt that I get to work with a lot of my friends from Stanford.

How is it timely?

It’s timely in a few ways. First, public awareness of the environment, the impact of automotive emissions and interest in alternative energy transportation is higher than it’s been in the past 25 years. Another related issue is that reducing American dependence on foreign oil is a real issue. But more importantly it comes down to the fact that the technologies have evolved, mostly driven by the economies of scale from hybrids and from consumer electronics. The batteries are just a lot better than they were even five years ago, and we are really at the point where what we are trying to do is just about to be feasible. We do know that the technology trajectory is going to get better. I can’t predict where the price of oil is going to go, but ultimately I don’t suspect it is going to go down in the long term. So it’s time for us to be looking for solutions that make sense for the good of our general population.

How is business?

Business is great. The press has been very kind to us and everywhere we go people are interested in what we're doing and they wish us luck. We have a tremendous amount of work to build an electric car and build a new car company. The challenges are abundant. But it really helps to know that people agree with what we are up to and that we’ve got a lot of great people to help us.

What are the company’s longer-term plans?

The Tesla Roadster, which was code named Darkstar, really is an entry vehicle for our venture. It was designed for early adopters—people who want the great performance that we can offer, but it is an expensive car. It allows us develop the technology, the business systems and the supply chain to get to the next step. We are beginning to work on a next vehicle, codenamed Whitestar. The Whitestar platform is going to bring our technology to the next level of the population.

Whitestar will be a four-door, five-passenger sports sedan benchmarked against cars like a BMW 5-series or a Mercedes SLC. The car will carry over a lot of the powertrain technologies but will have much more utility for you as an everyday driver. It is targeted to be $50,000-$65,000 depending on the option package. It is still a performance-oriented car but much more friendly for everyday use.

What did you learn as an ME student here that you still apply today?

Ultimately my time at Stanford really got me to start to look broadly, much more broadly than I had at any point in the past. It opened my appetite for looking at the world differently. And I think more importantly it also brought a very pragmatic perspective to that process that was cemented during my time as a Teaching Assistant at the Product Realization Lab. Concepts are great but reducing them to practice is where the rubber meets the road. It’s one thing to talk about how something is going to be, but it is another thing to build it, demonstrate it and in the process create some new reality. That’s really empowering to me. The concepts that are taught in the methodologies of the Design Division, embodied in the PRL about realization, are the core of what I do. Those are the same values that were reinforced at IDEO where I practiced and honed them over my time. We try to do the exact same thing at Tesla.

You spoke to Professor Beach’s class this afternoon. Clearly you’ve maintained a close relationship with the PRL and the school.

It is a thrill to be invited to come back and share some stories about what we are trying to do as well as thoughts on how you get where you want to go from Stanford. Every time I come to campus I meet great people and feel invigorated by the enthusiasm here. After graduation, I used to come back and coach for ME 203. I became involved as a coach and lecturer for Dave Beach’s IDMM classes over the course of the years in the 90s. I also enjoy helping out AIM and have had the pleasure to speak at a couple of events. I’m also looking forward to Telsa’s involvement with the Cool Products Expo, which is a kind of homecoming for me because my classmates Dan Ostrower Greg Lamps, and I founded the event in 2000. It’s a great way to spend some free time.