By David Boyce
Almanac Staff Writer
Ordinarily, American cars and Midwest manufacturing plants go together like hot dogs and mustard — you don’t have one without the other. But with General Motors and Ford Motor Company each recently announcing plans to lay off 30,000 employees, and with Toyota poised to surpass GM in overall sales, these are not ordinary times.
With all the ruckus going on among industry giants, the timing may be right for smaller, nimbler players to get a piece of the action — and Woodside appears to be one hub of entrepreneurial activity.
Ian Wright, the designer of the X1 prototype electric race car, is one of three Woodside residents involved in new automotive designs. Mr. Wright is the CEO of Wrightspeed Inc. and is looking for capital to fulfill plans to build a factory in the Bay Area, perhaps on the Peninsula, to assemble high-performance electric cars and sell them for $100,000 apiece.
The X1 gets the equivalent of 170 mpg and recently humbled a 400-horsepower Ferrari and a 600-horsepower Porsche in quarter-mile races at a drag strip in Sonoma County.
Mr. Wright’s involvement with electric cars has local roots. For a year, he served as engineering vice president of San Carlos-based Tesla Motors, which has plans for an all-electric car. And two Tesla executives — CEO Martin Eberhard and engineering vice president Marc Tarpenning — are also Woodside residents.
The Almanac attempted to include Tesla in the cover story this week, but Jessica Switzer, vice president of marketing there, said the company isn’t talking to the press except to say that they’re designing an electric car “that people will actually want to drive.”
The company’s Web site, at teslamotors.com, notes that “great cars, and the companies that build them, are not made overnight; and so we are not yet ready to announce specifications or delivery dates.”
