John Thomas

John brings over 35 years of experience in product engineering, operations and executive leadership starting with automobile engineering at General Motors and Ford followed by 10 years of increased responsibility at multi-billion revenue automotive suppliers. He then moved to Tesla Motors where he was selected to be the first Head of the Model S program and the future factory operations. While at Tesla, John helped secure the $462 million US Dept of Energy loan that launched Tesla as a manufacturer. Inspired by Tesla, John later founded and ran his own startup called ALTe Technologies for over 6 years achieving a $100 million valuation. Forbes magazine selected ALTe to receive the “America’s Most Promising Companies” award. Afterwards, John served as a C level consultant for several client firms in the electric vehicle, energy storage, charging infrastructure and cleantech industries based in China, the USA, Australia and the EU including NIO corporation, Helix Motors, EnerBlu and Daimler Corporation for their Greenlane JV with BlackRock and NextEra Energy. John holds Bachelors’ Degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Business Administration from Lawrence Technological University and an MBA from Eastern Michigan University.