He transferred to Cisco Systems in 1998 to design switches and routers, just as Wi-Fi hit the market. In 1993, he moved to California, where took a job at Network Equipment Technologies, a communications equipment company, building networking switches for ATM machines. He got his start as an audio engineer for radio stations and recording studios in Sydney, Australia. Raised in rural New Zealand, Wright always scored top marks in math and science classes, leading to jobs in the electronics industry post-college. It’s all experience that led me to this.” I’ve been at startups and big companies alike. I helped them get the company funding, but it wasn’t my idea. I was a co-founder at Tesla, but it wasn’t my idea. “This is really the first time that I’ve come up with a business plan that I thought was really good. “I’ve always wanted to run my own business,” Wright tells NationSwell. Despite the fact that Wright dresses in crisp, white button-downs and slacks at his San Jose, Calif., office today, you can tell he’s spent countless hours hunched over an engine, his hands greased and black. He’s able to rattle off the horsepower, torque and miles per gallon for various models - knowledge only an experienced collector would memorize - with a familiarity that demonstrates his keen sense of where his company can carve out a niche. But years of tinkering and observing have all led to this moment. Up to now, Wright, a soft-spoken, unassuming engineer, has always sat in the passenger seat: a vice president, not chief Tesla’s “car guy,” (the person who knows the ins and outs of high-performance vehicles) not a visionary. Wright admits, it’s far from glamorous - literally, about as far as you can get from luxury sedans - but he believes electrifying commercial fleets will have greater benefits for the environment than capturing a share of the personal car market will. His Bay Area company, Wrightspeed, is installing range-extended electric powertrains (the generators that electric vehicles run on) in medium- and heavy-duty trucks for companies like the Ratto Group, Sonoma and Marin counties’ waste hauler, and shipping giant FedEx. One of the co-founders of Tesla Motors, the all-electric car manufacturer whose stock price has jumped 1,040 percent since 2011, Wright has a new vehicular venture in mind targeting the opposite end of the spectrum: electric trucks. It isn’t easy for a startup to disrupt this scene, but if there’s one man who can pull it off, it’s probably Ian Wright. The automobile industry is a tough business to break into: huge capital outlay and byzantine government regulations have kept three American companies - Ford, General Motors and Chrysler - on top for almost a century.
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