Tesla Changes the Road Rules

Toyota or Honda don't give their hybrids the same quality of styling and design as the classic European cars being produced by Ferrari, Porsche, and Mercedes, well, hold on to your helmet. Here comes the Tesla Roadster

The Tesla is an electric car that looks like a Lotus (in fact, it was designed in conjunction with Lotus and manufactured at the Lotus plant in the UK), but this car gets 135 miles per gallon, goes 0-60 in 4 seconds, produces no harmful emissions, and doesn’t make a sound.

The brainchild of Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning — ex founders of NuvoMedia — the Tesla was developed for people who want to drive high performance, energy efficient cars but “didn’t want to suffer every minute” of driving an electric vehicle.

As they say on their website:

“We needed to change perceptions of electric vehicles in a big way. To make electric cars a viable alternative, we set out to build one that was gorgeous and thrilling to drive Our first car, the Tesla Roadster, isn‘t a plan, pipedream or prototype; this car exists and is for sale now. It‘s a no-compromise driver‘s car that can accelerate faster than a Porsche 911 and hit a top speed of nearly twice what the law permits. With a range of 250 miles on a single charge, you can use it all day long and not worry you‘ll run out of juice. Just plug it in at night the same way you drop your cell phone into its charger, and sleep well, without guilt.”

You read it right: 250 miles on a single charge. And the beautiful thing is that you can recharge the car’s battery at pretty much any normal electrical outlet. Additionally, Tesla offers a solar package that allows you to install solar panels at home so you can power your car completely grid free.

Tesla claims that the Roadster is actually twice as efficient as current popular hybrid cars on the market (and up to six times as efficient as standard cars), including the Prius, because it has no combustion engine at all. Yet, even with a two-speed transmission, it manages to outperform most of them.

Tesla has already sold about 40 or so cars at about $100,000 each, but the car won’t be available until early 2007, and only then in select “luxury sports car markets” like Los Angeles, The Bay Area, Chicago, Miami, and New York.

Eventually Tesla plans to build an electric powered sedan that will retail for between $50,000 and $70,000. If their first stab with the Roadster is any indication, they’ll be rewriting the rules for that model as well.

For more information: www.teslamotors.com