As he pulls away from the headquarters of Tesla Motors in San Carlos, CA, JB Straubel apologizes for the condition of the car. The outside looks fine, a gleaming orange. But inside, instruments dangle from the dashboard. A message scrawled on blue masking tape warns that the passenger's-side air bag is disabled. A bell chimes mysteriously. The car had been shipped to England and subjected to vibration tests designed to "shake it apart and kill it," Straubel says. Now it's an engineering car--one Straubel, the company's chief technology officer, feels comfortable drilling holes in and bolting prototype hardware to. "It's pretty much already written off," he says. "But it's also the fastest car in our fleet at the moment."

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