A lot of people talk about Apple one day buying Tesla, but it turns out Google is the one that actually got close. First reported on Bloomberg, in an excerpt from Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, an upcoming Ecco-HarperCollins book due out May 19th, in early 2013 Musk is said to have begun negotiating a deal to sell Tesla to the mega-search company through his friend Larry Page, who happens to be Google’s co-founder and CEO.

What’s interesting about this, aside from the obvious, is that Page even denied it when asked point blank in an interview for the book, saying “I don’t want to speculate on rumors,” and that a “car company is pretty far from what Google knows.” And yet, at the time, Tesla was starved for resources, and couldn’t quite make some of its flagship features like parking sensors and radar-assisted cruise control work right away.

It got pretty bad by the end of 2012, as the first vehicles were sold and rumors of bugs began to swirl, according to the book. “The word of mouth on the [Model S] sucked,” Musk said. From the book:

In the first week of March 2013, Musk reached out to Page, say the two people familiar with the talks. By that point, so many customers were deferring orders that Musk had quietly shut down Tesla’s factory. Considering his straits, Musk drove a hard bargain. He proposed that Google buy Tesla outright — with a healthy premium, the company would have cost about $6 billion at the time — and pony up another $5 billion in capital for factory expansions.

[Musk] also wanted guarantees that Google wouldn’t break up or shut down his company before it produced a third-generation electric car aimed at the mainstream auto market. He insisted that Page let him run a Google-owned Tesla for eight years, or until it began pumping out such a car. Page accepted the overall proposal and shook on the deal.

And then…things appear to fall apart between the two. Tesla began to sell more cars, and then began to need Google’s resources less and less. Things would have been pretty different in the tech world now if Google had owned Tesla for the past couple of years, even allowing time for the merger to work itself through. I can only imagine the level of Android Auto sophistication we would have had in those cars. And to think of the progress Google has already made with its self-driving cars, and what Tesla could have contributed to that. Well, as they say, there’s still time.

A few weeks ago, Tesla unveiled its latest trim level, the Model S 70D, which starts at $75,000 and includes 240 miles of range and all-wheel-drive as standard.