Tesla Trivia
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68 free Tesla trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Tesla trivia quiz covers both things people mean by the name. The first half is Nikola Tesla: his birth in Smiljan, the AC induction motor licensed by Westinghouse, the Niagara Falls contract, the Colorado Springs experiments, the radio-controlled boat at Madison Square Garden, Wardenclyffe Tower and J. P. Morgan, the pigeons, the New Yorker Hotel and the SI unit named for him in 1960. The second half is Tesla, Inc.: its 2003 founding by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, Elon Musk's arrival, the Lotus-based Roadster, the Model S, the falcon-wing Model X, the Model 3 and Y, the stainless-steel Cybertruck, the Fremont plant bought from Toyota, the Gigafactories, the Supercharger network, the Roadster launched into space and the trillion-dollar milestones. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer has been checked against a reliable source.
30 of 68 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Nikola Tesla is best known for his contributions to which electricity supply system?
Alternating current
Alternating current: his induction motor and polyphase designs became the backbone of the modern grid, putting him opposite Edison in the 'war of the currents'.
Q 02In which present-day country was Nikola Tesla born in 1856?
Croatia
Croatia: he was born to an ethnic Serb family in Smiljan, then in the Austrian Empire's Military Frontier.
Q 03Which company licensed Tesla's polyphase induction motor patents in 1888?
Westinghouse Electric
Westinghouse Electric, which used Tesla's system to win the contract to harness Niagara Falls.
Q 04At which 1898 New York exhibition did Tesla show a radio-controlled boat, his 'telautomaton'?
Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden; Tesla then tried to sell the idea to the U.S. military as a radio-controlled torpedo, which showed little interest.
Q 05In which Rocky Mountain city did Tesla set up a high-altitude experimental station in 1899?
Colorado Springs
Colorado Springs, where his artificial lightning reportedly burned out a local power-station generator and caused an outage.
Q 06What was Wardenclyffe Tower, built on Long Island in 1901-02?
A wireless transmission station
Wardenclyffe was a wireless transmission station meant to send messages across the Atlantic. A web cartoonist's crowdfunding campaign helped buy the site for a Tesla museum in 2013.
Q 07Which financier put $150,000 into Tesla's Wardenclyffe tower project?
J. P. Morgan
J. P. Morgan put up $150,000 for the tower, then refused Tesla's repeated pleas for more money and the project collapsed.
Q 08Which rival beat Tesla in December 1901 by sending the letter S across the Atlantic?
Guglielmo Marconi
Tesla believed Guglielmo Marconi's system copied his own patents. The U.S. Supreme Court partly vindicated Tesla's radio patents in 1943, months after his death.
Q 09Which famous author became a close friend of Tesla in middle age and spent time in his lab?
Mark Twain
A photo shows Twain holding one of Tesla's glowing lamps.
Q 10Where did Nikola Tesla live from 1934 until his death in 1943?
The Hotel New Yorker
The Hotel New Yorker was his last stop after decades of unpaid hotel bills; he died alone in room 3327 in January 1943.
Q 11In his last years Tesla spoke of a special bond with what kind of animal that visited him?
A white pigeon
He fed the birds in Bryant Park daily and said one injured white pigeon visited him and that he loved her 'as a man loves a woman.'
Q 12In 1960 the tesla was adopted as the SI unit of what?
Magnetic flux density
The tesla measures magnetic flux density, the strength of a magnetic field. Slovenian engineer France Avčin proposed naming the unit after Tesla.
Q 13Which rock star played Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan's film The Prestige?
David Bowie
David Bowie turned the role down at first, so Nolan, a lifelong fan, flew to New York to persuade him in person.
Q 21Which Tesla won Motor Trend's Car of the Year in 2013?
Model S
The Model S won by a unanimous vote, the first Car of the Year winner in the award's 64-year history not powered by an internal combustion engine.
Q 22Which Tesla is known for its 'falcon wing' rear doors?
Model X
The Model X's falcon-wing doors were among the problems that delayed its launch.
Q 23Which Tesla drew more than 325,000 reservations within a week of its 2016 unveiling?
Model 3
Tesla called the Model 3's first week of pre-orders, about $14 billion in implied sales, the biggest one-week launch of any product ever.
Q 14Which Tesla invention throws artificial lightning at science shows?
The Tesla coil
Tesla designed the Tesla coil in 1891, the same year he became a U.S. citizen.
Q 15Which 1893 fair showcased Tesla's polyphase system, helping win the Niagara Falls contract?
The World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago
Tesla's polyphase system lit up the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a public triumph in the war of the currents against Edison.
Q 16Which two men incorporated Tesla Motors in July 2003?
Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning
Eberhard was CEO and Tarpenning CFO. A 2009 legal settlement lets five people, including Musk, Wright and Straubel, call themselves co-founders.
Q 17How did Elon Musk first become involved with Tesla?
Led its 2004 funding round
Led its 2004 funding round: Musk became chairman using his PayPal fortune, and he took over as CEO only in 2008.
Q 18The first-generation Tesla Roadster was built on the chassis of which British sports car?
Lotus Elise
Lotus built the Roadster's modified Lotus Elise chassis in England and shipped it to Tesla for final assembly.
Q 19Tesla's 2010 IPO made it the first American car company to go public since which automaker in 1956?
Ford
Ford went public in 1956, and no other American carmaker listed until Tesla's Nasdaq debut in June 2010.
Q 20From which automaker did Tesla buy the former NUMMI plant in Fremont for $42 million in 2010?
Toyota
NUMMI had been a GM-Toyota joint venture. The Fremont Factory remains Tesla's first major assembly plant.
Q 24The Cybertruck's angular body panels are made of what material?
Unpainted stainless steel
The Cybertruck's unpainted stainless steel panels drew comparisons to low-polygon computer models when it was unveiled in 2019.
Q 25At the Cybertruck's launch event, what broke when Tesla's designer threw a metal ball at it?
Side windows
Tesla billed the side windows as nearly unbreakable 'Armor Glass', yet both windows he hit cracked during the demo.
Q 26Which SpaceX rocket carried Elon Musk's personal Tesla Roadster into space in February 2018?
Falcon Heavy
The Falcon Heavy's maiden test flight used Musk's cherry-red Roadster as a dummy payload, with a spacesuited mannequin called Starman at the wheel.
Q 27Which Japanese electronics company agreed in 2014 to invest in Tesla's Nevada battery Gigafactory?
Panasonic
Panasonic agreed to equip the Nevada Gigafactory near Sparks with machinery to make battery cells, in a plant first estimated to cost $5 billion.
Q 28Gigafactory Shanghai, begun in 2019, was notable as the first Chinese car plant to be what?
Fully owned by a foreign company
Giga Shanghai was the first car plant in China fully owned by a foreign company, where other foreign carmakers had needed Chinese joint-venture partners.
Q 29Which Tesla did Gigafactory Berlin start delivering to customers at its March 2022 opening?
Model Y
Giga Berlin opened by handing customers Model Y Performance crossovers, while environmentalists still fought the plant's water use.
Q 30Which solar company did Tesla acquire in an all-stock deal in November 2016?
SolarCity
SolarCity was founded by Musk's cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive, and Musk chaired both companies when Tesla bought it.