Velocity: Tesla's Green Adrenaline

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The Tesla’s top speed is 135 mph, but thanks to an incredible linkage between motor and transmission,    there is no concern about throttling back when the “power curve” kicks in. Too much torque in a very short time can spin the wheels and lead to loss of control. The Tesla is all power curve, so flooring it at any time gives you that “F-14 at takeoff” feeling. For this, the Tesla costs $92,000, commensurate with today’s high-end roadsters. More than 350 people (among them actor George Clooney) have paid to get these spicy machines, and the earliest adopters can expect their cars delivered from the Lotus factory in England sometime in the summer of 2008.

Order one now (teslamotors.com) and you might be able to have it by New Year’s Day ’09. Maybe.

All of which sounds like typical specialty-car hoop-jumping. Except the Tesla, aside from its remarkable performance, is going to revolutionize the car industry, according to Martin Eberhard, the CEO and founder of Tesla. And, in doing so, perhaps he’ll propel America and many industrialized nations deep into the environmentally friendly future.

Above all else, this performance comes from an Electrical Storage System (ESS in company lingo) made of lithium ion batteries, the same power system in a laptop computer. These batteries do not use acid or lead, so they require no special handling or recycling. At the company’s headquarters in San Carlos, south of San Francisco, the roadster’s key components lay broken out, which allows you to see a large black box that looks like a server on steroids holding the equivalent of 6,138 battery cells.

“We weren’t like General Motors, that decided when it wanted to build an electric car, it looked to its current parts suppliers and strung together a bunch of old-technology lead batteries,” says David Vespremi, Tesla Motors’ PR director. “We decided to solve the power supply problem first, and then we built a car around it.”

Eberhard who has four “startups” under his belt, including E-Book, decided with Tesla engineers that a small, light car would maximize performance. The issue was power. Snappy performance comes from lightweight cars, and the Lotus Elise was chosen as a platform. “We’re in Silicon Valley,” Vespremi continues. “What do we know here? We know batteries.”

The Tesla in looks is a modified Elise, yet so different, and therein lies the reason why venture capitalists could be seen showering employees with $100 bills from the roof of the company’s building. According to Vespremi, more than four years of R&D went into developing the ESS and the 70-pound motor (the size of a watermelon) that provides all this performance, power, thrill and satisfaction.

$3 per Tank

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