Tesla Roadster: No Gasoline, Plenty of Juice

Life Cars & Motorcycles
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(mods - either here or techno? your call)

They are starting with the sports model to draw attention - and they are!
Already selling, with production plans, optimistic?, for 1000 models a year @ US$92,000 per.

[quote]

The New Electric Car Doesn’t Compromise on Style or Speed

It goes zero to 60 in about four seconds. Its top speed is 130 miles per hour. And it doesn’t use an ounce of gasoline.

It’s the Tesla Roadster, a new car that’s fueled entirely by electricity and could be hitting the lot just in time. Today the Energy Department reported that the average gallon of regular gasoline is now $3.10 – a new nominal record price for the United States.
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The Tesla Roadster is named after Nicola Tesla, the largely forgotten genius inventor of alternating current electricity, and it’s the brainchild of Martin Eberhard, who said he designed it because he cares about the environment and because he wanted one for himself.

“It’s time for us to do something about our dependence on foreign oil,” Eberhard said. “It’s time for us to do something about global warming. But I wasn’t ready to go drive around some goofy little car. … Think of how electric cars look. All the ones you’ve ever thought of.”

There haven’t been many electric cars. Early automobiles ran on electricity, as did General Motor’s ill-fated and quickly abandoned EV1, which debuted in the 1990s and died soon thereafter. Eberhard said there’s “nothing beautiful” about the Prius, perhaps the best-known hybrid car. “It doesn’t do anything for me,” he said. “Think of it this way. A world of 100 percent hybrids is still 100 percent addicted to oil.”

ABC News - Tesla Car Co.[/quote]

Looks like a very possible contender for the newest US car company in the makings.

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Looks like it has a nice NSX looking rear end, I like that. I love the performance figures, although I would like to know how far or how long it can go on a full charge and how long it takes to recharge. It would be fantastic if one day the manufacturers of the growing number of electric vehicles could come together with a standard battery design so that filling stations could incorporate battery chargers or battery replacement/swapping services.

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The story mentions 200 miles on a 3.5 hour charge. The drawback is that the batteries have to be replaced after 100,000 miles. It comes down to the batteries - if they could get up to around 600 miles on two-hour charge they’d have a real shot.

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How the hell am I gonna charge it if a) I’m in a 5th-floor apartment, and b) even if I could run a 5-storey-long powercord out my window and down to it, the chances of getting a parking spot right below my window are bloody nil ?!

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Buy a gas-powered generator :slight_smile:

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for electric cars to really work they would have to build an infrastructure to support it. And make it as simple and efficient as pulling into a service station or even just parking on a spot that would somehow charge it through some other means, hands free.

Nice car, though.

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Oh, great. At 7:45 am, on my way to an 8am job, I’m running out of juice so I get to pull into a station, plug in, wait 2 hours and arrive at work late. :loco:

Hey, I’m all for clean air in the cities, but I don’t see this working in Taipei. I’d rather pull into a station, get a fillup of hydrogen, and be on my way. Of course, I wouldn’t want to rent an apartment next to a hydrogen station in Taipei. :astonished: :stuck_out_tongue:

No doubt, GREAT car though. :smiley: If I were living in the suburbian midwestern US, yeah, maybe.

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Well it’s certainly not a long-distance car… but for normal daily driving in Taiwan it should be good…the idea being - I guess - to charge it overnight while you sleep…

perhaps a second set of batteries in the boot or something will help to increase it’s distance…

also, with a lot of talk about free-energy lately (on some other boards)… this car certainly has a lot of potential~

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100,000 miles on a set of batteries? No problem!

Who’s complaining? that’s about the lifespan of a petrol engine anyway. Or about 40,000 miles on a sports motorbike (admittedly a bit more stressed). rings, valves, valve guides, conrods, big and little end bearings, mainshaft bearings, all die sooner or later, and 100,000 miles of city driving would just kill your car. I have seen a taxi in sydney with nearly 1 million km on the one engine, but that’s a diffrent story: non-stop driving, and never cooling down will extend your engine life considerably.

And batteries will get better too, if there is this much research poured into them. The main problem of batteries at the moment is the weight! carrying batteries around is much more inefficient than generating power through an on-board engine.

But in the long run, with an electric car, it is not pollution free: the pollution is only transferred to the power station. The important thing is to get rid of the fossil fuel power stations as well. Solar-generated hydrogen seems a much better long term option… whether the hydrogen is burnt in an internal combustion engine (Wankel rotary, Sachs orbital, benz, diesel, whatever), in a fuel cell, or in a power station that gives you the power through a cable.

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Run a sneaky line from the nearest night market.

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After nearly a year (since the OP) Tesla rolls out its long-awaited electric sports car.

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If you pay monthly for your own underground parking spot - as you’d likely do if you had purchased a 100,000 USD car - it wouldn’t be difficult to have a power socket installed for it.

200 miles is pretty decent. It would at least take care of daily commutes. If the price was closer to a third of what it is I’d really consider one.

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I’d be interested in knowing the cost comparison between running an equivalent gas powered car and this one.

Battery technology will improve, however the energy will only be as clean as the original source. Anyone claiming the use of such a car to be carbon neutral would be a fool, although its a step in the right direction.

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ultimately it must be better to centralize then the current situation with millions of motorcars spewing pollution randomly.

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There is some information about the cost on the Tesla Motors homepage (and in the sub-menues).

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I’d prefer independent analysis

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Buy one and tell us about it. First person is always more interesting. :sunglasses:

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Sexy car

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There is a fascinating article in March? April’s? May’s Car and Driver where one of the editors lays out his hypothesis that electric cars are the new muscle cars. They are quite capable of putting a lot of power onto the tarmac, but the take-home message from the article was that we simply haven’t created the right batteries for the job yet. A good read for anyone who’s interested.

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Tesla planning a Sedan for less than USD60000