Episode 501: Special Guest: Tesla Co-Founder JB Straubel
Ride the Lightning: Tesla Motors Unofficial Podcast
Ryan McCaffrey
4.8 • 988 Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2025
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tesla co-founder, current board member, and former Chief Technical Officer JB Straubel joins me to discuss Tesla’s early days, his interest in batteries, building the first Gigafactory, his battery recycling efforts at Redwood Materials, and more. Enjoy!
TIMECODES
10:45 Interview starts
11:33 More of a car guy or engineering guy?
12:14 Origin of his interest in batteries
12:47 Building his first EV…long before Tesla
14:43 Did he always want to go to Stanford for engineering?
15:35 How JB met Elon
17:55 Recalling when he helped build the first Lotus Elise engineering mule for Tesla
18:43 JB still has his original Tesla Roadster
20:30 On the origins of Gigafactory 1, aka Giga Nevada
21:28 What car(s) JB daily drives
24:11 How Tesla acquired the NUMMI plant from Toyota
25:16 What were the challenges of building the Model S versus the Roadster
27:41 How JB felt when the Model S started winning awards, like Motor Trend’s Car of the Year
29:07 Did Panasonic get on board with Giga 1 right away?
32:21 How Model 3’s “production Hell” was for JB
33:33 When JB felt like Tesla was going to be OK
35:07 When he started thinking about battery recycling
36:41 How JB feels about EV FUD
38:08 Battery recycling actually leads to better quality batteries
39:17 Figuring out what it would take to start Redwood Materials
41:03 It’s not just about EV batteries
42:15 Redwood Materials’ not-so-secret master plan
43:48 Goals for scaling Redwood Materials
45:04 Expansion plans
46:20 A tidal wave of EV battery recycling is coming
47:24 How much education is needed on the corporate side?
48:42 What about educating the general public about battery recycling?
50:32 What can Tesla/EV owners do to help spread the word about battery recycling?
52:07 Yes, you can send your ready-to-be-recycled batteries to Redwood Materials
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On this week's episode of Ride the Lightning, the Tesla N.E.V. podcast, Tesla co-founder, |
| 0:05.5 | current board member and former chief technical officer, J.B. Straubel, |
| 0:10.0 | joins me to discuss Tesla's early days, his interest in batteries, building the first gigafactory, |
| 0:15.8 | his battery recycling efforts at redwood materials and more. What's happening, friends? |
| 0:41.6 | I'm Ryan McCaffrey, joining you for episode 501 of Ride the Lightning, |
| 0:46.8 | your weekly Tesla and EV podcast. |
| 0:50.1 | To my left, a snoozing Daisy the Boxer, |
| 0:52.8 | and I want to welcome you to the end of the episode 500 festivities. |
| 0:58.9 | I promise this is it. |
| 1:00.6 | It was three episodes of special stuff. |
| 1:03.8 | No more surprises after this, no more interviews, at least for a little while. |
| 1:08.1 | Next week, I will be back to doing the regular news recaps and analysis. |
| 1:14.2 | And for me, I hope for you too, this has been a really, really fun stretch these last few weeks. |
| 1:21.1 | And I hope you've had fun with it. I got really lucky, honestly, in that number one, episode 500 didn't fall on a quarterly |
| 1:31.3 | earnings call, or number two would be even worse, like a big Tesla event, like a vehicle |
| 1:37.9 | unveiling or something. It fell very nicely right at the beginning of March, and I will take it. |
| 1:46.0 | And before I get to everything this week, I do want to give one more shout out to longtime |
| 1:52.1 | ride the lightning listener and audio professional Matt Parra, who has generously donated his |
| 1:59.2 | time and talents to helping me get all three of the interviews |
| 2:03.3 | over these past three episodes sounding as good as they possibly can. Because again, I am not good |
| 2:10.5 | at recording two people in a room. And Matt has helped me out more than he probably realizes. |
| 2:19.7 | And more than any of you realize, |
... |
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