The Tesla Roadster
Well, the blog’s been up for three days now, and I’ve already had a request to discuss the Tesla Roadster. There’s no doubt that this car adds a real dimension of sexiness that’s often lacking in environmentally-friendly vehicles. If you’re familiar with this car, you might notice that GreenCar’s main header image is actually a Tesla (partially obscured by a motion-blur filter). If you’re not familiar with the Tesla Roadster, I hope that you’ll find this article informative, and frankly, rather exciting. Nevertheless, before we get too excited, here’s the caveat: Tesla Motors currently has no plans to sell the Roadster outside of the United States. 
Anyway, let’s take a look at this wonderful sports car:
The Tesla Roadster is built by Tesla Motors, a company chaired and principally owned by PayPal founder and Space Travel entrepreneur Elon Musk. Interestingly, Elon Musk is South African born and raised, so maybe the Tesla will make it back to his mother country at some point. The car was unveiled in July 2006, and it will be launched in October 2007.
The Tesla is based on a Lotus Elise chassis, lengthened a strengthened to cope with the 450kg lithium ion battery. It is powered by a 185kW 3-phase, 4-pole electric motor capable of propelling the 1100-ish kilogram car from 0 to 100km/h in 4 seconds. That’s pretty much as quick as Porsche’s current (997) 911 Turbo.
The car has a pretty useful range of around 320km. It comes with a 70-amp charger (installed into your garage) that charges the battery fully in 3.5 hours. If you’re away from home, you can charge the car using a normal wall plug, but this lengthens the charge time to 33 hours. Tesla Motors claim that the battery is good for at least 160 000km worth of charging.
Of course, the best news of all is the car’s efficiency - reported as 133 Wh/km or equivalent to 1.74 l/100km. For more in-depth information about the Tesla’s efficiency and how these figures were calculated, check out Tesla Motors’ white papers.
The Tesla’s not exactly cheap - at just under $100 000, it competes in price with cars such as the BMW M6 convertible and the Audi R8. Nevertheless, for rich American motorists who want a sportscar with minimal environmental impact, this must be very very tempting vehicle indeed.
Now if Mr. Musk could just launch it in his home country.
For a lot more information, pictures, white papers and presentations, check out Tesla Motor’s excellent site.
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I love the fact that the car only has 3 gears, and that reverse had to be restricted to stop you from doing 0-100 in 4seconds backwards
This car is amazing, but even if it does come here, whats the price gonna end up being? Over a bar I’m sure.
Hopefully more manufacturers start doing this kinda thing