Elon Musk: “Any new technology is expensive when it starts out”

Right now, the reason to create a sports car, a roadster, as the first stage of this, is because it attracts attention or what?

Oh, so good. Great, great question. Because people often misinterpret why we have created a sports car. So, like, did I feel that there was somehow a shortage of sports cars for rich guys or something like that? And that was the part. Any new technology is expensive when it starts out, and you can point to pretty much anything. And because the first thing that engineers are trying to do is make it work. And then when you make it work, then you optimize and you optimize and you optimize. And if you look at the early days of computers or cell phones or almost anything, even the early days of gasoline cars, they used to be toys for rich people. And then you combine that with the fact that we were just a little startup, there was just no way that we could afford a billion dollars to make a giant car plant that would make hundreds of thousands of cars a year, because that's the kind of volume you have to get to to make cheap cars. So we had both a volume problem and a new technology problem. You have to reach scale, and you have to work the bugs out of the system, and you want to make mistakes at a small scale.