2012–2016 Original
The launch car, designed in a corner of the SpaceX factory and sold first as the 85 kWh Signature edition, which won Motor Trend's top award and a record Consumer Reports score.
Franz von Holzhausen joined Tesla in August 2008 from a career that had included General Motors and Mazda, and his brief was a sedan code-named White Star. Working with a small team in a back corner of the SpaceX rocket factory in Hawthorne, he finished the design in about eight months, and the prototype was shown there on March 26, 2009. Peter Rawlinson, previously chief engineer at Lotus, joined in 2009 to turn it into a production car.
The run-up to launch was not smooth. In January 2012 Rawlinson and Nick Sampson, another senior executive, left the company, and Tesla shares fell as much as 20 percent. Tesla said Rawlinson had completed the conceptual and design engineering work on the car. Deliveries began anyway on June 22, 2012, at an invitation-only event in Fremont. The first car went to Steve Jurvetson, a Tesla board member and the earliest depositor, and the opening months were limited to Signature and Signature Performance cars with the 85 kWh pack.
The car's reputation was made quickly. Motor Trend's judges voted unanimously in November 2012 to name it the 2013 Car of the Year, the first time in 64 years the award went to a car without an internal combustion engine. Consumer Reports scored it 99 out of 100 in May 2013, noting that it tied for the quietest vehicle the magazine had ever tested, and in November 2013 it topped the magazine's owner satisfaction survey.
On June 20, 2013, Tesla staged a battery-swap demonstration at its Hawthorne design studio, replacing a Model S pack from below in about 90 seconds and quoting a price of roughly $60 to $80 per swap. The demonstration drew wide attention, though swapping never became a regular part of Tesla ownership.