It was late last winter when I began speaking with Lane and his partners at Kleiner Perkins. But then outcomes were hard to predict with precision, he admitted, even for venture capitalists who spend their working hours imagining the future. He said he hoped to sell several thousand in the first year and eventually reach annual sales in the tens of thousands, with a sticker price below $30,000.
As we drove, Lane told me that if things went well - if the Think’s manufacturing process could be made more efficient, for instance - the car would go on sale in the United States in 2009. So Lane and I explored the private streets around the two Kleiner Perkins buildings instead. But this Think, one of only three in the United States, had no license plates or registration. 101, which snakes through Menlo Park and down into Mountain View, Sunnyvale and San Jose, high-tech towns where Lane and his colleagues at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers have been financing companies (Google and Netscape, among others) for the past 36 years. It would have been a fine adventure to see if the Think could hit its top speed of 65 m.p.h. It was one of those hot, dry, cloudless days on Sand Hill Road, the wide avenue in Silicon Valley lined with some of the country’s most powerful venture-capital firms. I shifted into drive and hit the gas pedal - actually, the electricity pedal - a little too hard, and the Think lurched forward. “There we go,” Lane said, sitting back with a pleased expression. A turn of the key started up a barely perceptible hum somewhere under the hood. “The Think is 95 percent recyclable,” Lane said matter-of-factly, giving me the sense that we were about to drive a milk carton rather than a car. Inside, the dashboard was seemingly made of densely woven fabric, and the seat was covered in a material that felt decidedly un-Corinthian. “You want to drive?” Lane asked, tossing me the key. In a lot full of gleaming new vehicles, some of them owned by the wealthiest venture capitalists in the United States, this car - branded the Think - seemed distinctive mainly for its lack of sparkle.
To my eye, the car resembled a generic European compact, but with some differences the body, for instance, was made from a textured, plasticized material. The car, built in Norway, was powered by batteries and had a plug-in outlet hidden under a flip-top cover near the driver-side door. One afternoon last May in Menlo Park, Calif., a venture capitalist named Ray Lane led me from his office to the parking lot, where an automobile had been delivered a few hours earlier by flatbed truck.
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