Who is Tesla?

Southern California, 2003. A man called Martin Eberhard is driving a yellow kit car with no roof, no doors and no engine. It is called the tzero, it is built by a tiny firm named AC Propulsion, and it runs on batteries. Eberhard likes it so much that he asks the company to build them for sale. They say no.⁴

So he decides to do it himself.

Eberhard and his business partner Marc Tarpenning had already built one gadget ahead of its time: the Rocket eBook, an e-reader that arrived years before the Kindle, made by a company they sold in 2000 for US$187 million.¹ Around Palo Alto they kept noticing the same driveway: a Toyota Prius parked beside a Porsche. Rich people wanted to be seen being green, and they still wanted a proper car.² Nobody was selling them one car that did both.

On 1 July 2003 the two of them incorporated Tesla Motors in San Carlos, California, named after Nikola Tesla, the inventor whose motor design they planned to use. The plan was an electric roadster in the spirit of the tzero.³⁴

Elon Musk was not in the room yet.

The man with the rockets

Building cars eats money, and two e-book engineers did not have enough of it. They had once met a man at a Mars Society conference who was trying to build rockets, which felt like the right level of ambition. His name was Elon Musk, and he had made his fortune from PayPal, the online payments company.⁵

Musk had driven the tzero as well, and had asked AC Propulsion the same question Eberhard had. He got the same answer, along with a suggestion: go and talk to Martin Eberhard.⁴ In February 2004 Musk put US$6.5 million into Tesla's US$7.5 million first funding round and became chairman.⁵

The Roadster was shown to the world in July 2006 and went into limited production in 2008.⁶ It was late, it was over budget, and the boardroom turned ugly. Eberhard was out as chief executive by late 2007.² Musk took the job himself in October 2008, the company's fourth CEO in about a year.⁵ Eberhard sued him in 2009 for libel and breach of contract, then settled. The settlement is why exactly five people, Musk included, are officially allowed to call themselves Tesla founders.⁷

Christmas Eve, 2008

Then the global economy fell over.

By January 2009 Tesla had delivered just 147 cars, and Musk had put US$70 million of his own money in.⁵ He was funding a rocket company at the same time, and has said both came within days of failing that year. He split what he had left between them.⁸

The funding round that kept Tesla alive closed on Christmas Eve 2008. Musk later described it as the last hour of the last day that it was possible.⁸

Three things happened next, and any one of them failing would have ended the story. In May 2009 Daimler, the German parent of Mercedes-Benz, bought just under ten per cent of Tesla for a reported US$50 million. Musk has said that investment saved the company. A month later the US Department of Energy approved a US$465 million loan, which Tesla repaid in full by May 2013.⁵ And in 2010 Tesla bought a shuttered car plant in Fremont, California, for US$42 million. The factory was called NUMMI, and it had been run jointly by Toyota and General Motors until GM's bankruptcy.⁹

Tesla listed on the stock market that June at US$17 a share, raising US$226 million.⁵ Toyota bought US$50 million of stock on the side.⁹ A company that had sold a few hundred sports cars now owned one of the biggest car factories in America.

The cars that made it real

The Model S arrived in 2012 and did what the Roadster could not: it made a normal, rich person choose an electric car over a German saloon because it was the better car.¹⁰

The Model 3 was the hard one. It was meant to be the affordable Tesla, and building it in volume nearly broke the company. Musk warned of "production hell" at the first Model 3 handovers in July 2017, and 2018 delivered it.¹¹ In January 2019 Tesla started building a factory in Shanghai so it could make the Model 3 inside the world's biggest EV market.¹²

It worked. The Model 3 was the world's best-selling plug-in car from 2018 to 2020, and in June 2021 became the first electric car to pass a million sales.¹¹ Its taller sibling, the Model Y, was written off by critics as a bloated Model 3 and then became the best-selling car in the world in 2023, of any kind, petrol included.¹³

Along the way Tesla changed what everyone else had to build. Over-the-air updates, a screen instead of a dashboard, a charging network owned by the carmaker. He Xiaopeng has said that seeing Tesla open its patents in 2014 helped push him into cars, which is the opening chapter of Who is XPENG?

Where it stands

For years Tesla sold more fully electric cars than anyone on earth. That ended in 2025. It delivered 1,636,129 cars that year, down 8.6 per cent and its second annual fall in a row, while BYD, the Shenzhen battery maker turned car giant, sold more than 2.25 million fully electric cars and became the world's biggest EV maker for the first time.¹⁴

Europe was the sore spot. Registrations there fell 28 per cent over the first eleven months of 2025 while the EV market around Tesla grew 27 per cent, a gap most analysts put down to Musk's political involvement.¹⁵ The man who saved the company in 2008 became the reason some buyers walked away in 2025.

Musk's answer is that Tesla is becoming something other than a carmaker. On the January 2026 earnings call he confirmed the Model S and Model X would be wound down, with their Fremont lines converted to build Optimus humanoid robots.¹⁶ The last of each rolled off the line on 10 May 2026, fourteen years after the first Model S.¹⁷ The 3 and the Y carry the car business.

Turned away twice

Tesla's history with Singapore is longer and stranger than most people remember.

The first attempt was in 2010, with an office at Suntec City. It lasted six months. Tesla had counted on green-technology tax breaks from the Economic Development Board, the government agency that courts foreign investment. The EDB said the Roadster had not met its technical requirements. Without the breaks, which would have halved the price, the car cost between S$400,000 and S$500,000. Tesla left in February 2011 without selling a single car.¹⁸¹⁹

The second rejection happened to one man.

In July 2015 an IT professional named Joe Nguyen bought a used Model S in Hong Kong and shipped it home, hoping to put the first Tesla on Singapore's roads. It took seven months of testing and paperwork.²⁰ At the end of it, the Land Transport Authority ruled that his car used 444 watt-hours per kilometre, more than double the figure Tesla quoted for the car when it left the factory, applied a factor for power-station emissions, and arrived at 222 grams of CO2 per kilometre.²¹ That put a car with no exhaust pipe in the same band as a Maserati Ghibli.²⁹ Instead of a rebate, Nguyen got a S$15,000 surcharge.²⁰

"I don't get it, there are no emissions," he said.²²

A car with no exhaust pipe, taxed in the same band as a Maserati Ghibli.

I was a freelance journalist in 2016, filing for a handful of publications. I went with a friend to an event, and somewhere in the small talk Nguyen mentioned that he had finally got a Tesla registered here, and what it had cost him. I wanted to know more. I asked if I could go for a ride in it, he said yes, and the piece I filed that week was the first report of the surcharge. It went around the world. A decade later it is the story that led to eevee, which is why it is on our About page.

On 4 March 2016 a Singaporean tweeted it at Musk, who replied that he had already phoned the Prime Minister, who had said he would investigate.²³ Seven months later the LTA confirmed it was standing by its assessment, although two Model S imports that followed were tested properly and got rebates.²⁴

Relations stayed frosty for years. In May 2018 Musk told a follower that Singapore's government was not supportive of EVs. In January 2019 he called it "unwelcome".²⁵ That August the environment minister, Masagos Zulkifli, replied that Musk was selling a lifestyle and Singapore wanted climate solutions.²⁶

Then the policy changed, and so did the mood. Tesla job ads for Singapore began appearing in July 2020. On 8 February 2021 the company confirmed it was back, and the sales website went live the next day with the Model 3 alone. It took over an old Nissan dealership at Toa Payoh Lorong 8 as its service centre. In July 2021 three Superchargers opened in the Orchard Central carpark, the first Model 3s were handed over, and a showroom opened at Raffles City with queues past the hour mark.¹⁹

There is no distributor. Every other brand in this series reaches you through a local dealer group. Tesla sells direct, online, at a fixed price, and services the cars itself.

It sold 941 cars here in 2023. In 2025 it registered 3,476, up from 2,384 the year before and good for sixth place among every brand in the country, helped by 110 kW versions of the Model 3 and Model Y that qualify for the cheaper Category A COE. BYD, in first, registered 11,184.²⁷

What it is like to live with one

We have lived with the Model 3 Long Range. It asks more of you on day one than any car we have tested: no gear lever, one stalk, mirrors buried in a menu, one-pedal driving you cannot switch off. Then it clicks, and underneath is a fast, quiet sedan with the best in-car AI assistant we have used. The full Model 3 Long Range review has the scores.²⁸

We have also had the Category A Model Y, which is the Model 3 in a business casual suit. Same screen, same Grok, same app, a bit more room and a bit less fire.

Joe Nguyen waited seven months and paid S$15,000 for the privilege of being first. Today you order the same badge on your phone, collect it in Toa Payoh and charge it at Orchard Central. Nobody bills you S$15,000 for the pleasure.