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TESLA Roadster

Tesla Motors

Feb 25th 2010: Tesla announces Roadster leases for $1,658/month*, can be delivered "within days"
Approx. 1,100 Tesla Roadsters have been built as of Feb. 2010
August 8th, 2009: Tesla shipped out 109 more Roadsters in July.
March 26th 2009: 300 now own Tesla Roadsters.
March 3rd 2009 : 200 customers have taken delivery of Roadsters.
Sept. 9th 2008 : So far, 27 customers have taken delivery of Roadsters.

the known distance-on-a-charge record is now - driving 313 miles on a charge:

2010 Tesla Roadster UK-Version -- automild.com - UK
February 9, 2010
Tesla Motors has announced the production of right-hand-drive versions of the Tesla Roadster, the only highway-selling electric vehicles all over the world.

Potential customers and the media can test drive the car right hand drive, available in the showroom, 49-51 Cheval Place, Knightsbridge district of London (SW7 1EW). In 2010 Tesla Roadster English version includes a unique suite of noise reduction materials, improving the sound system and other improvements that make it ideal for commuting or weekend drive.

The Tesla Roadster accelerates faster than virtually any other car on the road, which is the only production car faster than a Porsche and twice as energy efficient as a Prius. This method is fast becoming the choice to distinguish drivers who demand performance with a clean conscience.

The Tesla Roadster easily move more than 200 miles per charge in mixed driving conditions, do not consume oil and connected to 220 volts, conventional outlets in Europe. Maybe at all or partially filled by a solar or wind energy. Tesla Roadster for a client recently set a world distance record for electric vehicles with 313 miles on one charge.

"The right-hand-drive models our response to growing demand from buyers of high-performance cars in the UK, who is also interested in the impact on the environment," said Cristiano Carlutti, Tesla's Vice President of Sales and European Operations. "Tesla dramatically expand the trail in retail in Europe, we hope that our community building owners and enthusiasts from all over the continent."

Companies in the UK who buy a Tesla Roadster benefits from 100 percent of grant writing, which means you can reduce the price of the car of their taxable income. The Tesla Roadster is the only sports car that has qualified for the tax incentives in the UK.

The Tesla Roadster starts at £ 86,950 and costs around 1.5p per mile, compared with as many as 32P per mile Petro-sports car. Tesla Roadster drivers are not required to pay the London congestion charge, saving around £ 1700 a year. You can park for free and without limit of time in several districts of London, who received four hours of free parking burden, and they are exempt from tax for the next Hall of 950 pounds.

Tesla-S 4 door sedan
"The car will travel 300 miles on one battery charge, and the battery can be recharged in 45 minutes." - Elon Musk, CEO

Colorado Offers $42,000 off 2009 Tesla Roadster
October 23 2009 08:00 AM by Andrew Peterson
If you thought the federal government’s $7500 tax rebate on electric vehicles was substantial, Colorado is currently offering $42,083 in tax credits if you purchase a Tesla Roadster.

Colorado's current alternative fuel tax credits follow a stepped rebate based on the vehicle's emissions and its comparative cost to the competition. Colorado currently offers new green car buyers a percentage of the premium paid over non-hybrid vehicles. Tax credits follow a stepped scale, with zero-emissions and super-ultra-low emission vehicles receiving an 85 percent rebate -- which is how the 2009 Tesla Roadster ends up with a $42,083 rebate.

Residents of Colorado owe the large tax credit available to the difference in price between the Tesla Roadster and its gasoline-powered relative, the Lotus Elise. The difference (depending on the model) is some $49,000, with 85 percent of that returned to the customer come tax time.

Tesla Roadster on sale in Canada as of... today, deliveries start in Q4 '09

Canada has not always been the friendliest territory for electric cars, but that's changing. After the Tesla empire officially expanded to Chicago yesterday, the company has announced it will join the northern rush and is now ready to take orders in Canada. Canadian buyers will have to wait until the fourth quarter of 2009 to actually get their cars, but they should feel free to sign up for the $109,000 electric car whenever they feel like it. Oh, and that's the U.S. price; the cost for Canadians will be set later this year) The first deliveries will be made out of upcoming Tesla "regional centers" in Seattle and New York, but Canada-based stores are in the works.

In the announcement of the Canadian sales, Tesla highlights one big difference between American and Canadian Roadsters: the electricity used to power the vehicles is much more likely to be clean up north:

Canada and Norway are the only two countries worldwide where the majority of electricity comes from renewable resources, including run-of-river small hydro, wind, biomass, geothermal and solar energy. An EV recharged from the current Canadian grid, on average, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 85 percent compared to an equivalent gasoline-powered vehicle. In hydro-dominant British Columbia, Quebec and Manitoba, the reduction would be an impressive 98 percent.

Tesla's first showrooms opened last summer in Los Angeles and Menlo Park, Calif. After Chicago, Tesla plans to open a store in London, U.K. It is finalizing site selection in Manhattan, Miami and Seattle and is scouting sites in Washington, D.C. and Munich, Germany.

March 17 2008

On March 17, Tesla Motors achieved their goal of starting regular production of the Tesla Roadster.
Tesla started production, making one or two cars a week, but it says it will steadily increase production to around 100 cars a month by early next year.

With an EPA rating of 135 MPG equivalent, the Roadster provides super car performance at twice the energy efficiency. The batteries provide a range of more than 200 miles (333 km) between charges. The Roadster runs on 6,831 laptop computer batteries stuffed in a car, assembled by Britain's Lotus.

More than 1,000 customers have ordered the $98,000 2008 Roadster

A "start-up" co. in silicon valley, Calif., Tesla Motors, Inc., has developed the Tesla Roadster, a 100% electric vehicle named after Nikola Tesla . It has an EPA combined range of 245 miles, weighs about 2500 lbs, goes 0 to 60 in less than 4 seconds, and tops out at 125 mph. It is not a hybrid. The car debuted July 19, 2006 in Santa Monica.

Initial key markets are in metropolitan San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Miami.

Aug 2, 2007
Tesla Motors, announced this week it plans to set up its Northern California hub in Menlo Park by occupying one of the four vacant car dealership lots on the east side of El Camino Real. The company signed a short-term lease last Friday with Stanford University, which owns the old Anderson Chevrolet site at 300 El Camino Real. Mike Harrigan, Tesla's vice president of customer service and support, said the university gave Tesla an excellent price. "The lease made it a no-brainer for us,"

Menlo Park location will serve as a retail showroom and service center, as well as a starting point for Roadster deliveries. Harrigan said the company probably won`t stock Roadsters on the lot. By next summer, Tesla Motors will have stores in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago, Harrigan said.

The San Carlos-based company plans to build 800 Roadsters this year and hopes to reach peak production of 2,000 in 2008

it costs about $3 to charge, translating into about a penny per mile,
and can be charged from any wall outlet in 3 1/2 hours.

March 2007
Following the launch of the Roadster, Tesla will then look towards building its new "White Star" sedan model. When ready, the new sedan is expected to cost roughly half what the Roadster currently costs and will be manufactured at a plant in New Mexico.
Tesla secured $20m in state subsidies to build a factory in New Mexico. (see below)

February 22 2008
Vice President Darryl Siry also divulged more information about the startup's production plans, saying Tesla plans to produce about 1,800 Roadsters for the U.S. market this year and to expand into international markets, such as in Europe and Asia, in 2009 or 2010.

The world unveiling of the Tesla Roadster fell on July 19, 2006, just 10 days after the 150`th anniversary of Nikola Tesla's birth

"Even judging from our brief test ride, we'll proclaim that this thing will slay on the backroads. The torque (acceleration) is unbelievable! And eerie. The power just comes on right now and does not abate. It's absolutely batty; unlike anything we've experienced. We think our kidneys may still be embedded in the seatback. And it sticks.
"The Tesla electric car's really been the only plug-in sled we've so far been able to love."

Tesla Motors has managed to secure initial funding from prominent investors, such as PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Elon Musk has been the primary funding source for Tesla Motors and Chairman of the Board, from when Tesla Motors was just "three people and a business plan".

Tesla has a signifigant relationship with Lotus. A design contest was held for the final design of the Tesla Roadster, then codenamed "Dark Star", which Lotus won. Lotus will build the roadster, which is similar in size and appearance to their Elise. Tesla is currently working on a sedan, codenamed "White Star" which may be introduced as early as 2008.

The roadster is easily more than twice as efficient as any Hybrid on the road. They cost less per mile to drive, use less fuel per mile, and produce less pollution per mile. The Tesla Roadster produces one-tenth of the pollution and is six times as efficient as the best sports car. The Tesla Roadster needs only two gears because the motor delivers high torque over a much wider range of rpm's than any gasoline engine. No reverse gear is needed; the motor runs backwards for reversing.

How Tesla Motors has already, single-
handedly, revived the electric car:

Despite GM/Chevy's development of the Volt, which everyone knew was a concept car that would never see the road - since the heads of GM had no interest in it - and,

"GM engineers didn't want to switch gears to a plug-in electric which they insisted couldn`t be run on lithium-ion batteries. The turning-point came when tiny Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley start-up, announced in 2006 that it would produce a speedy electric sports car powered by those same lap-top batteries" "That tore it for me," says (Bob) Lutz (Vice Chairman of Product Development and Chairman of GM North America). "If some Silicon Valley start-up can solve this equation, no one is going to tell me anymore that it's unfeasible."
"The Man Who Revived The Electric Car" (Bob Lutz) -by Keith Naughton, Jan. 7 2007 Newsweek

"How powerful is the acceleration? A quick story to illustrate. A favorite trick here at Tesla Motors is to invite a passenger along and ask him to turn on the radio. At the precise moment we ask, we accelerate. Our passenger simply can't lean forward enough to reach the dials."

"We've 'sold out' of our special edition Signature One Hundred Roadsters (sold out "in less than 3 weeks"). We're now taking reservations for our next 100 Tesla Roadsters to be built." [with plans to build 1,000 in 2008]

2007-02-21, Washington Post/Reuters:
Already 330 celebrities, including George Clooney, have signed up to buy the Roadster

August 8 2007: LOS ANGELES (Reuters)

The Silicon Valley-based Tesla has pre-sold 570 cars to celebs. like California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for his wife Maria Shriver, and actor George Clooney. The company will make 1,000 2008 model year cars. All 1,000 have already been pre-sold ... "Members of our wait list will be offered any additional 2008 cars that may become available or will be first in line when we begin taking orders for the 2009 Tesla Roadster." - Tesla Motors web site.

(click to see enlargement)

7-20-2006

Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Tesla Roadster

Gov. Schwarzenegger talking with Elon and Martin

"There was plenty of legroom"

Interestingly, while travelling, it can be recharged from an ordinary 110 volt socket using Tesla's mobile kit (albeit much more slowly). One of the major problems with GM's EV1 was that it was married to its charging unit. Tesla, using technology licensed from AC Propulsion, has rather cleverly mitigated this problem, although the dedicated charging unit remains the fastest way to top up the car.

(former) CEO Martin Eberhard

Co-founders Eberhard and Tarpenning partnered with PayPal and Space-X co-founder and future-leaning entrepreneur Elon Musk and, went through three rounds of startup funding and raised $60 million for their dream project, Tesla Motors.June 1, 2006: Tesla Motors has raised an additional $40 million in a third round of venture capital from a bunch of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including the wealthy co-founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who have owned Prius'. The news is significant because alternative energy cars - like the Prius - until now have lacked flash, and some of the wealthy yet environmentally-conscious set have been hankering for something cooler - a little more like a Ferrari. We reported last month that PayPal co-founder Elon Musk had made an early major investment. Musk has not experienced a lot of failure. His first Internet company, Zip2 - which he built from scratch - sold for more than $300 million. Then he co-founded PayPal, which sold for $1.5 billion.

Note: Each customer made a $100,000 deposit to join the Signature One Hundred Club and reserve their "Signature One Hundred" special edition Tesla Roadster. The "Signature One Hundred" edition includes a commemorative plaque in the cockpit personalized for the customer and signed by the company's principals, a special Signature One Hundred trim package and all available options, including a state-of-the-art navigation system and a hard top. Deliveries of the Tesla Roadster are expected to begin in mid-2007.

The "Signature One Hundred" special edition Tesla Roadster sold out in just three weeks!

The Tesla's transmission has two speeds but for our drive (at Pebble Beach), the car was purposely locked in Second. Step on the gas, whoops, I mean the accelerator, and it scoots away nearly silently in a rush of instant torque. First gear would essentially double that torque, but unless we were racing a Vette or a Viper, Second is enough. Even without the lower First gear the Tesla really hauls. Tesla's claim of running 0-60 in around 4 seconds sounds plausible. You squirt through traffic holes without the hesitation - it's absolutely always in meat of the power-band. And all you hear from the power-train is a hushed turbine-like wail from behind your head. Ferraris and Lamborghinis are known for making great noises. But the Tesla plays its own tune and it's a futuristically cool one.
Popular Mechanics

Gov. Schwarzenegger, another 'soon to be' Tesla owner, talking with (former) CEO Martin Eberhard

VOLTING AMBITION

Pat Devereux, Top Gear, May 30, 2007

0-60mph in four seconds? Enough range to get you from London to Plymouth? Pat Devereux has seen the future of cars, and he likes it

Imagine a Lotus Elise that can do 0-60 in four seconds, has a top end of over 130mph yet can return over 135mpg. Think how good you'd feel if that Elise also produced no harmful local emissions and hardly ever needed servicing.

You'd imagine there to be a catch and, of course, there is. This sports car of your green dreams is a plug-in electric vehicle...

I know that will have got a couple of groans from the audience. But bear with me here, as this isn`t like any of those horribly cynical early efforts. The ones produced by global car companies trying to deflect attention from their tree-flattening SUV money-makers. This one's different. No, really, it is.

This one's called a Tesla, which I know doesn`t mean much to you now, but give it a couple of years and it could. Why? Because the man who owns the company is called Elon Musk and he has a habit of taking a left-field approach to big problems - and finding convincing answers that work.

Tesla has to produce something we want rather than we need, hence the fabulous-looking Roadster'

If he hadn`t had so much success already, you could reasonably accuse Elon Musk, Chairman of Tesla Motors, of being over ambitious. But he has, so you can`t. Musk, who currently drives a McLaren F1, was one of the main brains behind PayPal, the pay-over-the-internet system that he sold to eBay for $1.5bn in 2002.

The profit he came away with from that deal (and another previous big earner) funded the start-up of SpaceX (a low-cost space craft manufacturer that's now selling ships to NASA) and a solar power company, SolarCity. And now it's funding Tesla, too.

The aim of the company is to make cars that break our addiction to oil. And Musk knows that to do that, initially Tesla has to produce something we want rather than we need, hence the fabulous-looking Roadster.

But that will change as the rest of the range rolls out. After the Roadster comes the four-door family saloon in 2009 - of which Tesla anticipates selling in the region of 10,000. And after that comes the smaller four-door saloon sometime in 2010/2011 - sales for that are predicted at 100,000 units a year.

According to Musk, the ultimate aim is to be as big as BMW. "We'd like to exceed BMW volumes. The goal is to make a difference to CO2 emissions in the world. You can only make a difference if you can sell a lot of cars."

But can Tesla do that all by itself? Or would he consider licensing out the drive-train to other manufacturers?

"We're certainly interested in licensing the battery, the drive-train and so on to other car companies. We're already in fairly mature discussions. I can`t tell you with whom, but they are some very large car companies."

All of which is good news, especially taking into account how the price of fuel is rising - particularly in the States. Musk points out another issue with petrol: "China has something like only 35 million cars on the road. They have a population of 1.3 billion.

"India's got a comparable population and a comparably modest number of cars on the road. The demand for gasoline is just going ballistic and we are not discovering lots of new, easy sources of gasoline.

"I think, just based on true demand, without any taxes being imposed, gasoline could easily hit $5 in the US in the next 20 years. Then it would cost you $100 to fill up a 20-gallon tank.

"Compare that to the cost of recharging your car to go the same distance [as a full tank would get you] which will be maybe $3 or $4. It doesn`t matter whether you're environmentally aware or not, you will not buy the gasoline car."

So, petrol is not the future. But what about fuel cells? Others in the industry are pushing them as the future of motoring. Musk disagrees. "There really aren`t a lot of alternatives to batteries. The use of fuel cells is flat-out stupid and anyone with a fair knowledge of physics should understand that.

"Fuel cells are not used in any of the most expensive phones or laptop computers. Even satellites which might cost $100m to build use lithium ion [Li-ion] batteries. Now surely you'd use the best option in a $100m satellite wouldn`t you? There are also some basic energy equations that show that [using fuel cells] is quite stupid."

The only concern for those of us who've spent hundreds of pounds on batteries for our kids' toys is lifespan, then. But again Musk has an answer. "Historically, battery performance has improved by about eight per cent per year. I think it's reasonable to extrapolate that sort of improvement for some more years to come, driven primarily by the laptop and cell phone industry."

But also by the rest of the auto industry, too. Toyota has just announced that it is moving to Li-ion batteries for all its hybrids.

With that kind of demand and volume, you can expect the costs to keep falling and performance to keep rising.

With that rate of improvement, why not wait until batteries are at their peak and just make a hybrid now? Musk explains:

"We're more interested in extending the range of the battery car to the point where it can get up to 400-500 miles on a single charge.

"Why would you ever need a hybrid? There might be occasional situations once every six months when you need to go on a longer trip but then it's just cheaper to rent an SUV or something else for that trip."

"We want to extend the range of the battery car to the point where it can get up to 500 miles on one charge"

With petrol prices still climbing and acceptable emissions levels falling, you can see how a range of silent cars that does the equivalent of 100mpg+ and makes no muck could catch on.

But there must be something that could put a spanner in Tesla's works, a ghost in the machine.

Musk again: "Nothing is going to stop us from making the Roadster work. There are only little technology hurdles that need to be overcome as we build up the production line and do safety testing.

"For WhiteStar [the four-door family saloon] there's a little bit of work to be done to reduce the cost of the battery pack. But again, I don`t see anything stopping us from producing that car in 2009. Where I think it does get a lot tougher is making the battery pack for the $30,000 car."

Knowing Musk's track record, I don`t think that'll remain a problem for long. He seems to be a solutions kinda guy. When I asked why people would even buy Teslas he said because they're cool.

"People will buy the car just because it's a great car. We want them to think it's excellent value for money and then, oh yeah, it happens to be electric."

History of Tesla Motors