Nevertheless, Kroeger said Tesla has a different perspective that is beneficial to the old hands at Daimler. “ With us being in business for more than 125 years, we tend to think sometimes we know it all. Sometimes we don’t see solutions even when they are around us. Tesla has a more open approach to technological issues. It’s fun to work with them.”

Toyota agreed, and was especially interested to learn how to be nimble like Tesla.

“This is a gut check for us,” said Sheldon Brown, executive project manager for the Rav4 EV. “We said to ourselves, ‘Look at how Tesla is getting to market so quickly. They seem to be inventive and cutting edge. Are we too engrossed in our own culture?’ ”

As Toyota and Tesla began collaborating, they discovered they had very different approaches to vehicle development. “We are very pragmatic,” said Brown. “We get a lot of standards and specifications, then we build a prototype and test it. Tesla is a lot different. They get the standards and specifications set, and then change it on the fly. They spend more time in the validation phase. We spend more time in up-front planning.”

For example, Toyota ordinarily spends months writing software code for a vehicle before testing a prototype. “In this case, we were building logic as we went,” explained Brown. The first prototypes were structurally representative for early crash-testing, but they weren’t operational. “We were developing as we went.” It was more labor intensive to do it that way, Brown said, but they finished writing the code in just three weeks.