Steinbuch

About 25 students from Eindhoven University of Technology went to the evening session in Amsterdam .

I like to share with you some of the feedback i got from the students!

Hello again mister Maarten,

As you asked me, I am writing you in order to give you some photos from the event and to tell a bit about activities and discussions that took place.

First of all it was a very nice welcome event, with a lot of aperitifs and drinks. The “kick-off” of the event started when the recruitment manager together with another american responsible from Palo Alto started to introduce the Tesla Model S car. They talked about all the features and their mission in Europe.

After, there were another few people involved with Tesla ready to answer you questions. They encouraged us a lot to play with the car and ask as much as possible questions. Moreover if they were seeing you sitting alone, they were coming towards you to talk. I was amazed by their kindness and how open they are. I was most of the time engaged talking with a business manager that of course knew what is happening in all the “layers” of Tesla Co. Some intresting fact that he told me were about Elon himself. He discribed Elon as being one of those typical weird but really smart guys. You could just met him when crossing a coridor face to face and after that could follow that classic weird situation when both try to get room for the other but they are doing that in parallel, and a very awkward situation poppes up. All the managers are following his advices, they don’t debate on his choices which sometimes have no explanations. One example he gave was the fact Elon desided that it is literally COOL to use for some adjustment setting in the audio I believe a scale of 11 and not 10.

As I told you I asked : why Model S?. He said that it’s Elon’s idea and only his extraterestrial brain could bring such a decision. Elon’s explanations was: “haha, Henry Ford thought that he is the smartest guy when calling his first car Fort Model T, in honor of N.Tesla, but we are even smarter and we will call it Model S”, and the 4th generation is planned to call Model E of course. So they basically said that want to use all Tesla’s latters name. Asking about Model X, he explained that X first of all comes from 4 wheel drive and of the impresion of seing letter X that you get when the wing doors are opened.

Of course I asked him about the rumors which regards the battery. There is a movie in which Elon presents a Tesla which is placed on top of a platform that is able to swap the current battery with a fully charged one. The purpose is to have another full electric tank within 1:30 min (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlaQuKk9bFg). His argument was that this will never happen probably but of course Elon is trying to get everything connected and he is really enthusiastic about that. Another interesting thing he told me about the batteries is that they intend that after one life cycle of the battery (8-10 years), they want to recycle it fully.

Another interesting fact I have to mention is when during the design phase, they went for the software developers at Apple Co in California but for the Maps features, they went to Google, because they are doing better in this field. So he said that Apple complained about that, but they admitted that Google is better. Moreover they gave some cars to Google Company to make their research on autonomous driving on Tesla’s.

When talking with the recruitment manager, he said that the progress that Tesla is doing in Europe is mind blowing. Their main target is to recruite as many as possible economists and sellers to spread as much as possible the sales world wide. She came in Amsterdam last year and company’s target was to recruite 150 people, however she predicted that they will recruire much more, fact that happened (350 people).  She also said that the engineering activities are still all happening in California, but when talking about the future, all of them were skeptical due to the fact that “This company is suprising me at every corner, I don’t know what will happen next week”, they said. That’s why she mentioned that is hard to have a job in engineering field in Tilburg so far, since there is only an assambly line.

All the other guys went to the service room where some guys told them nice tricks about Tesla’s computers and other controls, I could not go, it was in Dutch :).

As a final remark, they said that eventually the company will grow bigger and bigger according to the nowadays perspectives, and they will need more and more bright students and engineers, especially from Automotive domain.

I would like to thank you for the opportunity given to be present at Tesla’s event and met wonderfull people.

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