Now we are going to have electric cars!
This COULD change the world as we know it!
The Eclectic Electric Sportscar
By Jon Alain Guzik
I've seen the future and it has four wheels, an electric motor and moves like the wind. The future is painted bright red, made of carbon fiber and is powered by 6,831 rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. The future has a top speed of close to 130 miles an hour and has a fuel efficiency--if you could refer to something without a gas tank and an internal combustion engine as fuel efficient--of about one penny a mile. The future has a range of 250 miles when topped off on clean-burning electric power.
Oh, the future also does 0-60 in 4 seconds and kicks you in the chest with more torque than you are used to. Drop the future into gear, hold onto your hats and glasses and away you go, off into the wild blue yonder. I've driven the future, its name is the Tesla Roadster and, to tell the truth, it's pretty darn awesome.
I've driven Audis at top speed on the autobahn, Lamborghinis on racetracks, Ducati's through the mountains outside of Bologna, Italy. I once sat shotgun in a vintage 1950s Mercedes-Benz SL Gullwing as we bombed up the Pacific Coast Highway at 125 miles an hour, the straight-six screaming, the ocean blowing past. But now that I've driven the Tesla at close to top speed on Caribbean Road in Sunnyvale, my perspective has changed.
Now, to tell the truth, I'm spoiled rotten.
Spoiled from the wind in my hair, spoiled because my previous gas-powered automotive experiences were matched, even somewhat surpassed, by a device designed by a team Silicon Valley geeks out of laptop batteries, carbon fiber and a lot of 21st Century gumption.
It makes sense, if you think about it, that a vehicle like Tesla would be an "Only in Silicon Valley" story, what with Tesla getting their initial monetary backing from what enigmatic CEO and co-founder of Tesla, Martin Eberhard calls, "The Sand Hill Road Shuffle", named after the venture capital firms that litter Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California.
Tesla Motors got their start in July, 2003 when Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, both Silicon Valley veterans, decided that they wanted to create a company that made a fully-electric vehicle that was both efficient and fun to drive. If you spent anytime behind the wheel of General Motors' EV-1, then you would know what a tough task that would be. Electric cars in the past had two things against them, one being a tiny range per charge (usually around eighty to one hundred miles) and the other being a lack of, to put it politely, driving finesse. They were too slow and drove harshly and were not the type of vehicles intended for those twisty roads that enthusiasts prefer to drive.
Eberhard, being an automotive freak himself, knew this and wanted to create a new and exciting vehicle. Eberhard and Tarpenning then partnered with PayPal co-founder and future-leaning entrepreneur Elon Musk, went through three rounds of startup funding and raised $60 million for their dream project, Tesla Motors. They would launch the company with something beyond audacious, their first vehicle, the Tesla Roadster, a 100,000-dollar electric car that was both environmentally friendly, good-looking and a whole heck of a lot of fun to drive.
What you can expect from the Tesla Roadster is a carbon-fiber body, a chassis developed and built by Lotus, a two-speed electrically actuated manual transmission mated to a 3-phase, 4-pole AC induction motor with a rotating magnetic field and a "red-line" of 13,500 rpm, which is fairly close to the redline in a Ferrari Formula One car. Plus, so many electronic gizmos and doodads that it makes the Honda Civic in your driveway, technologically speaking, look like Henry Ford's 1908 Model-T in comparison. The Roadster also has a USB 2.0 port, so forget about tuning the Tesla Roadster; this car is all about the hack. In all, a pretty amazing feat for a company about as far west from Detroit, in both spirit and execution, as the continent would allow.
And yet, the Roadster's performance features are as robust as any of the big sports car manufacturers. It is also big on safety, vowing to meet and surpass Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. Every Tesla Roadster will come with its own Electric Vehicle Service Equipment (EVSE), better known as a home charging kit. Included in the kit is a smoke detector that automatically shuts off power to the charging station if smoke is detected, reducing the chances of an electrical fire. The car's engineers also included a feature that prevents the car from being driven or even moving if the car is connected to the charger.
Now that the Tesla Roadster is close to rolling off the line, gas is near three dollars a gallon, the U.S. has no cohesive energy policy and the only electric car on the market looks a lot like a Lotus Elise and sounds like something out of I, Robot. When I asked Mr. Eberhard about his reasoning behind Tesla Motors * is he an environmentalist? A technologist? He paused and answered, "I'm both. None of us are just one thing. Am I an engineer? Am I a left-handed person? Am I a liberal? Am I an environmentalist? I'm lots of things, right? And we are not all 100 percent consistent either. You know, I do care about my footprint on the earth. I do care about global warming, but I also like to drive. And sometimes when I drive, I'm beating the hell out of my car. I'm wasting energy too you know, it's just the way I am. And I think that I'm not the only one like that."
No, he's not the only one, but hopefully sometime in the next year, if you can get past the 200 plus person waiting list, you too can be a little bit of everything and have a blast behind the wheel while you figure out what it is that makes you tick. Until then, keep saving for a Roadster of your own.
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