My Age of Investment

"Daren, come to the company quickly, we have encountered a difficult matter."

Not long after hanging up Li Lu's phone call, Xia Jingxing received a call from Eberhard. The latter's tone was faintly anxious and angry.

Xia Jingxing frowned, something happened to Tesla?

"What's wrong? The battery blew up? Is anyone hurt?"

"No, it's more serious than that. I can't speak in a few words on the phone. Come here quickly!"

Worse than a blown battery?

Xia Jingxing really panicked, and hurriedly asked, "What's the matter? Tell me quickly!"

Eberhard on the other end of the phone was silent for more than ten seconds, and then, like a child who made a mistake, he hesitated and said: "Uh...Ro

Xia Jingxing patted his forehead. He has been paying attention to Facebook and Youtube recently. If he didn't pay attention, Tesla created such a big surprise for him.

"Didn't you promise me? Absolutely punctual delivery with high quality and quantity?"

Xia Jingxing held the phone, his tone was a little excited, and he scolded loudly: "Now, what do we have to explain to the customer, so that others can't treat us as liars, as a company with no integrity?

Let me tell you, once the bad news of delayed delivery spreads widely, Ro

After sternly yelling, Xia Jingxing's chest kept rising and falling, and he was evaluating the various impacts this incident had on Tesla.

Building a car is not an easy task.

Tesla is now playing the role of a pioneer of electric vehicles. From technology to supply chain, everything is immature, and Tesla has to figure it out.

The founders of Weilai and Xiaopeng, the new car-making forces, are all Tesla owners. When they started their businesses, the upstream and downstream supporting industry chains for electric vehicles were much more complete, which is equivalent to crossing the river by touching Tesla.

And at this time, they didn't have anyone to refer to, as if they were walking in the dark, and it was very normal for them to step on a pit.

In fact, he wasn't as angry as he showed, he just deliberately put some pressure on Eberhard.

As a major shareholder, he has always had a high tolerance for Tesla, giving him what he wants, and helping him make suggestions from time to time.

It is often said that a loving father is a failure, so he can't spoil the management team too much.

The delivery time was promised by Eberhard himself.

Now that something goes wrong, you must take responsibility for it.

Eberhard's character has always been strong, but at this moment he knew he was wrong, and turned into a docile kitten, and said softly on the phone: "Daren, I will definitely take responsibility for this matter, I am now I'm looking for you because I want to solve the problem quickly. The situation is urgent and there is no delay!"

"Okay, I see. I'll be at the company in a while."

Xia Jingxing hung up the phone coldly, got up and walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out of the window at the Silicon Valley, which was connected by a park and a park.

There are very few high-rise buildings in Silicon Valley. They are all two or three-story buildings. The single-story building has a large area. It looks like a factory building on the outside, surrounded by various flowers and trees. The living environment is quite good.

After thinking for a while, Xia Jingxing looked away, called Liu Xiaoduo and Zhang Chenguang, and drove together to Tesla's newly relocated campus.

After Tesla completed its $40 million Series C round of financing last year, considering the increasingly heavy research and development tasks and the growing size of the engineering team, Tesla re-leased a small three-story office park with an area of ​​about 10,000 square meters. .

After a while, the car arrived at Tesla's new office park.

What appeared in front of my eyes was a three-storey office building with a concave shape, and an oversized T-shaped Tesla logo was pasted on the transparent glass exterior wall.

The open space in front of the building is used as a parking lot, where rows of cars are parked.

Around the park, lemon trees are planted, as well as some green belts and grasslands.

From what we have seen so far, Tesla is becoming more and more like a big company, and it is no longer like a small workshop before.

After the car was parked, Zhang Chenguang got out of the car and opened the door, holding the roof of the car,

Xia Jingxing slowly got out of the car.

At a glance, he saw Eberhard, Tarpenning, Straubel, Bodichevsky, Lyons and other middle and high-level management teams waiting for him at the door of the company.

They all wore dark blue polo fir, with a "T" logo on the chest.

This symbol represents a rod protruding from the rotor of the engine, while the second line above represents the stator.

The logo design of the car logo is arc-shaped, and the top protrudes outwards. It looks similar to the cross-section of the electric motor, but in fact it is a graphical representation of the cross-section of the electric motor.

"Daren, long time no see!"

Eberhard rushed forward immediately, first laughed and hugged Xia Jingxing, then pointed to the office building behind him, and began to introduce.

"The environment here is not bad, right? It's easier for us to recruit new employees than before."

Xia Jingxing guessed that Eberhard probably didn't want everyone to know about the delayed delivery, so as not to shake the morale of the army, so he changed the topic when he came up.

He also understood Eberhard's approach and considerations, so he nodded very cooperatively like a normal person, "Yes, the previous workshop was like a black workshop, and the employees were frightened when they came to the interview. , I thought I was interviewing for an auto repair shop."

Hearing this, everyone laughed.

Eberhard breathed a sigh of relief. Just now he was afraid that Darren would start scolding him as soon as he got out of the car. Not only would it expose the company's problems and shake the morale of the army, but it would also damage his prestige. It would be difficult to lead the team in the future.

Xia Jingxing was well aware of these unspoken office rules, so he didn't criticize Eberhard in front of his subordinates.

"Come on, Darren, I'll show you around our new office."

Eberhard enthusiastically led the way and led Xia Jingxing and his group to visit the new office building.

The first floor was divided and transformed into several large workshops with different functions, including dismantling of auto parts, battery assembly, and auto performance testing.

Although it is not a high-level workshop, compared with the clutter of the previous workshop, the brand-new and tidy environment in front of you still makes people feel a qualitative leap.

The second floor is an open office area. All 150 people in the company are concentrated here to work. The rows of workstations are full of dense heads, and everyone is working hard facing the computer.

Part of the third floor is empty, and the other part is the gym, entertainment room, leisure area and so on.

In the past, Tesla was often complained by neighbors due to problems such as workshop noise, explosions and fires, which made the engineers miserable.

Now that we have an independent park, we don’t have to worry about these problems anymore. We can devote ourselves to research and development, and no one cares about it.

In addition, Eberhard once reported to Xia Jingxing that there were often unidentified people wandering around the door of Tesla's workshop, sneaky and suspicious.

The original office park has concentrated many enterprises, which is a mixed bag, which is not conducive to the protection of important information of the company.

Considering all these inconveniences, Tesla simply decided to lease the current office park.

According to common sense, Tesla, which has no more than a hundred employees and only tens of millions of dollars in its accounts, is not qualified to be so arrogant.

In particular, Tesla has not yet officially delivered the car and has been in a state of loss. It should do everything possible to save money.

It was Xia Jingxing's strong support for the management team on the board of directors that contributed to this relocation plan.

After leading Xia Jingxing and his party to visit the three floors, the others left. Eberhard brought Xia Jingxing and Liu Xiaoduo to an independent office on the second floor.

As soon as the door was closed, Eberhard put away his smile, and said with an extremely heavy face: "Daren, this time it was my mistake. I underestimated the difficulty of manufacturing electric cars, which led to today's predicament. If If you want to punish, just punish me alone."

Xia Jingxing sat on the seat, held a cup of coffee, stirred it gently with a silver spoon, and didn't look at Eberhard's face, as if he didn't exist.

Liu Xiaoduo sat on the side quietly, watching her nose, nose and mouth, without making any sound.

The atmosphere in the room suddenly became awkward.

Eberhard sighed, "Hey, Daeron, no matter how you punish me, I will never complain!"

Xia Jingxing took a sip of the coffee, and gently put the cup on the table, "This coffee is not bad, but it tastes quite fragrant, but the taste is almost tasteless."

Eberhard understood the implication in an instant. Although he felt quite resentful in his heart, he suppressed his anger, let out a long breath, and said, "Daeron, everything has happened now. In addition, the most important thing should be to consider how to remedy.

I am also a shareholder of Tesla, and I am equally annoyed by the bad news of delayed deliveries. "

Xia Jingxing glanced at Eberhard, "Let's talk about the specific problem first!"

Eberhard said slowly: "As a super sports car comparable to Porsche and Ferrari, the Ro

At this time, the situation that ordinary electric vehicles are not equipped with multi-stage gearboxes obviously cannot meet Ro

But the problem is that there is no precedent in the industry for how to do systematic research and development between high-voltage and high-power electronic control systems and gearbox coordination. "

Xia Jingxing scratched his head, he suddenly thought of a question, does Tesla have a gearbox?

The answer is yes.

It's just that Tesla's gearbox and the gearbox of a fuel car are two different things.

Tesla uses a single-gear ratio gearbox, not a gearbox that can perform multi-speed ratio conversion as it is usually said.

This is because electric motors have three major advantages over internal combustion engines. 1. The peak torque can be reached after starting up; 2. The torque platform is very wide; 3. The speed is high.

This means that even without a gearbox, the motor can output relatively strong power at low speeds, and at the same time basically meet the legal speed limit through a fixed speed ratio.

Therefore, in the case of meeting the basic driving requirements and not pursuing extreme speed, adding a multi-stage gearbox to an electric vehicle will not only not significantly improve performance like an internal combustion engine, but also may reduce energy consumption and increase battery life considering the efficiency loss of the gearbox itself. .

Considering the problem of space layout, the possible increase of failed component units, and the most important cost consideration, it may be a better choice for electric vehicles not to use multi-stage gearboxes.

Therefore, it is right to say that electric vehicles do not have a gearbox, because his gearbox is a heterogeneous one.

Eberhard is now talking about developing a two-stage gearbox for Tesla, which is obviously going down an evil path.

Xia Jingxing's dusty memories are awakened, and Tesla is mass producing the first car Ro

In this way, under the drag of the secondary gearbox, the first model could not be mass-produced, and the launch plan was even postponed for a while.

In the end, Musk decided to cancel the plan to install a two-stage gearbox, and instead used an asynchronous motor with a single-speed gearbox.

But it also missed the best time for its appearance, which almost made Tesla stillborn.

Can the two-stage gearbox work? Can do it!

But the current Tesla will definitely not be able to play.

As the core component of a car, the gearbox is one of the important reasons for directly judging whether a car is good or bad and whether it is worth buying in the minds of many car enthusiasts.

In the automobile manufacturing industry, it is generally believed that the automatic transmission has the highest technical content and the most complex structure among automobile parts, and none of them.

In his previous life, Rabbit vigorously engaged in new energy vehicles and subsidized tens of billions. Apart from the consideration of the oil strategy, the most important reason was that he wanted to overtake on a curve.

Automobile is a century-old industry, and Rabbit was decades behind others in making automobiles. The technological catch-up is too hopeless.

I thought I could open up the automobile consumer market in exchange for technology, but it turned out to be lonely.

After thinking about it, we can only engage in new energy vehicles to overtake in corners and overtake a powerful country in the auto industry.

To be honest, Xia Jingxing also wanted to get a two-speed gearbox, because his current family background, technology accumulation, and time constraints did not allow him to pretend to be such a force at all.

Like the Porsche Tay is equipped with a 2AT gearbox.

Where is the strength of the two-speed gearbox? It is strong in the re-acceleration ability under high-speed conditions, that is, the re-acceleration ability of more than 100 miles.

If you accelerate from zero to one hundred, the single-speed gearbox is no worse than the two-speed gearbox.

In addition, without considering the gearbox, electric vehicles can also consider increasing the power of the motor to make up for the lack of power.

This is equivalent to opening two windows for electric vehicles. In terms of improving performance, you can improve the gearbox, or directly increase the power of the motor.

Of course, there will be many problems when directly increasing the power of the motor, such as high energy consumption, heating of the motor, reduced cruising range, and so on.

"Who is our gearbox supplier now?" Xia Jingxing looked at Eberhard.

"British Xtrac, a company specialized in the development of racing gearboxes."

Xia Jingxing knocked on the table, "Take me to the workshop, let me understand the situation first."