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The secret to how Tesla gets its cars to look absolutely fantastic (TSLA)

Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen gets to envision the future on its own terms — gorgeous electric cars that will someday be able to drive themselves.

  • Designer Franz von Holzhausen had an impressive resume before joining Tesla.
  • But the combination of his frustration with the traditional auto industry and Elon Musk's distinctive ideas about how to solve problems has taken his work to a new level.
  • He's followed an unlikely path to becoming the most influential car designer of his generation.

Before

Correction: An earlier version of this post said that von Holzhausen joined Tesla in 2010; he joined in 2008.

It was von Holzhausen, not Musk, who was the budding superstar back in the late 2000s.

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When von

Von Holzhausen mission was to create a "world-class design competency" for Tesla. The company's first car was cool, but the Roadster was based on a Lotus design. Von Holzhausen would have the nearly unique opportunity to start from scratch.

Tesla's roadmap, drawn up by Musk, was straightforward. The company had to first create an exciting electric car that would change the impressions that EVs were glorified golf carts. That car would be sold at a high price to early adopters and fans of high-performance, exotic sports cars.

The money would fund additional, luxurious, pricey electric vehicles, and that money would provide the funding for the first major endgame: a mass-market vehicle intended to bring long-range electric mobility to the masses.

The Roadster's Lotus underpinnings meant that when those ran out, Tesla would need a new car. For von Holzhausen, going to work at Tesla's earliest design studio in Hawthorne, CA, at SpaceX headquarters, that meant about two years to come up with a new vehicle — a rare opportunity to pen a "clean sheet" design.

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Roadster production would phase out by 2012. And regardless, Tesla had to start selling a more versatile lineup of vehicles. While a snazzy two-seater was fun to drive and thrilling to look at — more so when you realized you were running only on electrons — people wanted to buy sedans and SUVs.

Von Holzhausen had a lot of work ahead of him.

Tesla zigged rather than zagged with the Model S, which was revealed in 2011 and went on sale the following year. And von Holzhausen introduced his own design philosophy.

The auto industry is over a century old. Tesla is the first new carmaker to emerge in decades. So it's just about the rarest thing imaginable for a car designer to be able to imagine a new vehicle without feeling the explicit burden of the past. Just try to sketch a new Mustang at Ford or Corvette at Chevy.

Tesla was announcing itself as a real car company with the Model S, so von

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The Model S embodies radical restraint. It draws attention without demanding attention. For von Holzhausen, it's a vision of the future that just about anyone can understand.

It's also representative of von Holzhausen's restrained approach at Tesla. The Model S essentially looks the same as it did when it debuted. The main update was to the front end, when Tesla eliminated a faux-grille nose cones and went with a smooth treatment.

With an electric car, there's no need for a traditional grille because there's no internal-combustion engine to feed with oxygen or cool with airflow and a radiator.

The relatively conservative nature of a Tesla's exteriors is echoed inside. But predictably, there's a radical approach tucked away in here, too.

The entire interior of all Tesla's is organized around a large central touchscreen that controls almost all vehicle functions. It's even slanted slightly toward the driver for better viewing.

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To be honest, although it looks spectacular, it isn't always as functional as what you experience in vehicles that have retained knobs, switches, and buttons. But it doesn't matter. What Tesla, von Holzhausen, and the company's design team — including Musk — recognized is that a gigantic screen would reinforce the impression that Tesla's are about technology.

Nobody else in the auto industry has put a screen this big in a car. You can't avoid it when you slip behind the wheel or plop down in the passenger seat, so it automatically reinforces Tesla's branding.

The Model X was von Holzhausen's second all-original design for Tesla.

But the Model X is something of a conundrum.

On one hand, it's an extension of von Holzhausen's design language to the larger shape of an SUV. On the other, it's a departure from the efficiency philosophy because although the design is streamlined, the engineering isn't.

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Tesla overdid it, by admission, with the Model X. The vehicle was delayed for years before launching in 2015, beset with problems: the falcon-wing doors had to to redesigned, rear-seat production was brought in-house, and the vehicle faced recalls not long after it hit the market.

But the Model X is greater than the sum of its parts or flaws. It's easily the most technologically advanced vehicle currently on the road, and although von Holzhausen didn't depart from the Model X template, he showed that it was flexible enough to work on the two most important genres in the luxury space.

Von Holzhausen's third effort for Tesla was the Model 3.

The Model 3 really is a triumph. The Model S design scaled up beautifully for the Model X, but beauty doesn't always scale down. Not so with the Model 3, which manages to be more modest than the relatively big Model S without being a squashed-down version of that car.

This is the key to von

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And that taking away extends inside the Model 3.

That Franz von Holzhausen — the unlikeliest superhero to ever take up the task of designing cars.

I've probably talked to car designers more than I've talked to anyone else in the automotive profession. To a one, they're impressive, but von

And one more thing ...

Well, even Franz gives in to a little car-designer temptation from time to time. Sedans and SUVs are fine, but sometimes you want to create a road-going rocket that can do 0-60 mph in less than two seconds. Behold the all-new Tesla Roadster, revealed in late 2017.

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