Why Tesla is called Tesla

Here’s a nice bit of trivia for your next dinner party: the Tesla you drive is named after a person. Specifically, Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor who, more than a century ago, worked out how to send electricity across long distances using alternating current. Without his work, there wouldn’t be a modern electrical grid, let alone an electric car company bearing his name.

Who was Nikola Tesla?

Born in 1856 in what is now Croatia, Tesla moved to the United States in 1884 and spent the rest of his career inventing. He held hundreds of patents, including the design for the alternating-current (AC) induction motor. Its descendants turn up almost everywhere electricity meets motion, from washing machines to factory lines, and Tesla’s own early cars, the original Roadster and Model S, used induction motors built on the same principle.

He famously clashed with Thomas Edison, whose Direct Current (DC) system Tesla’s AC design eventually displaced for long-distance power transmission. The rivalry became so well known that David Bowie played Tesla in the 2006 film The Prestige.

Why name a car company after him?

Tesla’s founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning picked the name in 2003 as a direct tribute. Elon Musk, who joined shortly after as an early investor, kept it. The symmetry is hard to beat: a company building modern electric motors, driven by batteries and charged from an increasingly renewable grid, named after the engineer who made the modern electric motor possible.

Next time you get into your Model Y, give a small nod to an inventor who died in 1943 but whose fingerprints are all over your dashboard.

General information only, not tax, financial or legal advice. CAILO is not a registered tax agent, so speak to one before relying on this for a claim or return.