Sustainably Sexy, Meet the Tesla Roadster

You can imag­ine my sur­prise when my edi­tor at Organic Connections fired me an e-mail telling me of a high-performance road­ster being pro­duced that was 100 per­cent elec­tric and instruct­ing me to check it out and see if it was wor­thy of a story. You have to under­stand, it’s hap­pened before. Always on the look­out for inter­est­ing envi­ron­men­tal sub­jects, I not long ago ran across the story of a hybrid that was being touted in much the same way. But a lit­tle inves­ti­ga­tion brought dis­ap­point­ment; while the car was avail­able for pur­chase, it was years away from actual pro­duc­tion and it was not being offered in the US even in advance. The more I inves­ti­gated the Tesla Roadster, how­ever, the hap­pier I became. Could it be true?

Finding the Roadster

After locat­ing Tesla Motors’ web­site, I made the dis­cov­ery that, yes, this car does in fact exist. Not only that, it is indeed 100 per­cent elec­tric, it goes from 0 to 60 in 3.9 sec­onds, has a top speed of 125 mph, gets the equiv­a­lent of 256 miles per gal­lon (although it uses no such fuel), and is oper­ated for less than 2 cents per mile. And see­ing the pic­ture of the car on the front of the site, I was impressed; this thing could neatly hold up next to a Lotus—who, as it turns out, is pro­vid­ing a lot of assis­tance in the Tesla Roadster’s man­u­fac­ture. The car had been con­ceived by an engi­neer, entre­pre­neur and inven­tor named Martin Eberhard, who was con­vinced that if he could power an exist­ing sports car chas­sis with lap­top bat­ter­ies, it would be fea­si­ble to build and he’d find plenty of buy­ers among the speed-loving, planet-conscious res­i­dents of California’s Silicon Valley and beyond. Because gaso­line was cheap at the time he had his inspi­ra­tion, how­ever, ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists were not quick to get behind him— until he approached Elon Musk.

The 37-year-old Musk had co-founded PayPal and was forced out of the online­pay­ment com­pany but cashed in when it was sold to eBay. This gave him the fund­ing to launch SpaceX, a pri­vate rocket com­pany with the goal of shut­tling pri­vate cit­i­zens to the International Space Station by 2011. After a two-hour meet­ing in February 2004, Musk agreed to invest $6.3 mil­lion into Tesla. He would become the company’s chair­man, while Eberhard would be CEO. A few short years and a great deal of engi­neer­ing later, the car is nearly ready for deliv­ery, with one thou­sand already sold.

“All right,” I thought, “this is all very intrigu­ing. How easy would it really be to get my hands on one, if I were so inclined?” Clicking on a tab from the front of the web­site labeled “reserve,” I got an answer to that ques­tion. The Roadster has a base sticker price of $109,000, $5,000 of which would serve as a refund­able reser­va­tion fee and lock in the price. There is a 12-month wait for deliv­ery, and an addi­tional $55,000 ren­dered would lock in a pro­duc­tion slot and deliv­ery time frame.

Then I made the dis­cov­ery that really piqued my inter­est: If I wanted to take a lit­tle trip across town to West Los Angeles, I could actu­ally put my hands on one of these babies and find out all about it. One of the very first (one of two) Tesla Motors show­rooms was right over there, open for business!

With a grin, I called my edi­tor and told him I’d be doing the story. The very next morn­ing I fought 45 min­utes of the busiest traf­fic in the world over to the stylin’ side of town.

Seeing the Real Deal

As I exited the free­way onto Santa Monica Boulevard, the Tesla Motors show­room made itself quite appar­ent: a very high-tech look­ing store­front with large win­dows and granite-gray walls that neatly high­lighted the futur­is­tic red­dish Tesla Motors logo. I parked in the back and made my way in.

It was obvi­ous the place was pretty new. The spot­less show­room was empty save for two desks, a Tesla Roadster dis­play model, a counter with lit­er­a­ture and a cap­puc­cino bar. Upon my entrance, a young kid in a Tshirt and jeans rose from behind one of the desks. Of course my thought was, “Okay, are they kidding?”

As soon as the young man had intro­duced him­self and dis­cov­ered my mis­sion, he ush­ered us both out of the show­room and into the ser­vice area, and I found out that, no, they weren’t kid­ding. He is a col­lege stu­dent named Alex who is very hap­pily intern­ing with Tesla, and he proved to be extremely knowl­edge­able about the car and the com­pany. And it was for­tu­nate for me that he was; both the gen­eral man­ager of the store and the only other sales rep were quite busy with an eager lit­tle crowd of peo­ple obvi­ously anx­ious to see and hear all about the Roadster—a pretty amaz­ing sce­nario for any car deal­er­ship on an early week­day after­noon, let alone one far out of the auto­mo­tive mainstream.

It was in the ser­vice area that they kept their lone pro­duc­tion model of the Roadster (the one in the show­room was a pro­to­type). Seeing it up close, I was impressed: a dark, classy gray, it sleekly sat low to the ground, its two-seat cock­pit a vision in black leather and chrome. The top was removed, both the hood and trunk lids were raised, and Alex imme­di­ately started list­ing out the details of this amaz­ing piece of auto­mo­tive tech­nol­ogy. We began in the rear of the car. Alex ges­tured to a large black box that occu­pied the major­ity of what would nor­mally be the trunk space. He explained that most of the com­puter work­ings were in there, along with the Energy Storage System (ESS) that pow­ers the vehi­cle. The ESS is com­prised of 6,831 lithium-ion batteries—the very same type that pow­ers lap­top computers.

I had to ask Alex why nor­mal lead-acid car bat­ter­ies could not be used. “They’re not nearly effi­cient enough to pro­vide the per­for­mance we need,” he answered. “You basi­cally have three dif­fer­ent lev­els of bat­tery: the lead-acid kind you find in your aver­age car, the more effi­cient pris­matic NiMH bat­tery such as that found in the Toyota Prius hybrid vehi­cle, and the lithium-ion bat­ter­ies we’re using. The lithium-ion bat­tery is many times more effi­cient than the pris­matic bat­tery, its clos­est competitor.”

The bat­tery pack is cooled by a sys­tem that uti­lizes the same coolant used in internal-combustion vehi­cles. The com­puter sys­tem con­tin­u­ously tracks bat­tery his­tory, per­for­mance and avail­able energy.

Alex pointed a short dis­tance away to the small wall-mounted charg­ing unit that would be placed in the owner’s garage. The unit runs off a 220-volt home out­let and will charge the car up in three and a half hours. I asked if the Tesla could be charged at the hybrid sta­tions that are now found along some major high­ways, and Alex replied, “No, and for that rea­son I do tell peo­ple that the Roadster isn’t for every­one. It will go 220 miles on a charge, so you don’t want to go fur­ther than 110 miles from home in one go.” He also said, how­ever, that Tesla is plan­ning to pro­duce a con­verter in the future that will allow charg­ing at hybrid stations.

Included in the rear-end black box is the Power Electronics Module (PEM). This mod­ule con­tains high-voltage elec­tron­ics that con­trol the motor and allow for inte­grated bat­tery charg­ing. The motor and PEM have been designed as a tightly inte­grated sys­tem that deliv­ers up to 165 kilo­watts of motor output.

Alex then indi­cated the ser­vice bays across the room. “Since the car is run by com­puter, I tell peo­ple that bring­ing the car in for ser­vice is a lot like tak­ing your lap­top for ser­vice,” he said. “Most of the ‘ser­vice’ is the instal­la­tion of soft­ware updates.”

He also asked me to notice the spot­lessly clean ser­vice bays (they were close to immac­u­late). This is because the car uses no oil or gasoline—hence, there is noth­ing to dirty up the place or spread fumes. That explained the con­spic­u­ous open door between the show­room and ser­vice area.

The last thing Alex showed me in the rear was the soft top for the car, folded neatly and stored. He said it could be put on in less than a minute. The high-performance AC elec­tric motor is also hid­den in the rear of the car, but that wasn’t some­thing we could look at.

We next moved around the side, and Alex pointed out the high-performance Yokohama tires designed for high lev­els of trac­tion, respon­sive han­dling and dri­ving con­trol in wet or dry con­di­tions. He then slapped the Tesla’s side and told me it was made of car­bon fiber—something reserved only for high-performance vehicles.

Since we were stand­ing on the driver’s side, Alex motioned at the open door and asked, “You want to climb on in?” After a quick ver­i­fi­ca­tion that he wasn’t kid­ding, I wasted no time in low­er­ing myself into this dri­ving wonder.

Although I poke fun at such things, I was imme­di­ately over­whelmed by midlife-crisistype fan­tasy. The car lit­er­ally enveloped me in its soft leather from the backs of my knees all the way to the back of my head; my legs stretched nearly straight out, the con­toured con­trols only a short reach away, and in no time at all I was men­tally fly­ing down the high­way in near silence under a blaz­ing blue sky, catch­ing the eye of every envi­ous dri­ver I left behind in a blur.

Realizing how much of a fool I must have looked in front of all the peo­ple in the room, I quickly adopted a more seri­ous look, man­aged with some effort to push myself up and out again, cleared my throat and asked, “Are you plan­ning on releas­ing a sedan any­time in the near future?”

“Yes, we are,” Alex replied. The com­pany is plan­ning a five-passenger sedan, cur­rently known as the “Tesla S,” to be released in 2011 and priced at around $60,000. Good news for older guys like me who are at least try­ing to appear sensible.

We then made our way to the open hood in the front, and where I would nor­mally expect to see an engine I saw a few mechan­i­cal parts and two cool­ing fans. Alex informed me that the long, nar­row yel­low box I was see­ing on top was a heater. “The engine gen­er­ates no heat,” he said. “So when it’s cold, you need this.” Finished with the tour of the car, I then asked about pro­duc­tion. “We’re start­ing slow, pro­duc­ing about 120 cars a month,” Alex said. That explained the 12-month wait for a car stated on the company’s website.

One hur­dle that has caused the Roadster to be a bit late in its ini­tial deliv­ery has been the trans­mis­sion. According to a recent arti­cle in Fortune mag­a­zine, Tesla chair­man Elon Monk has all along insisted that the Roadster be equipped with a two-speed trans­mis­sion, which would allow the promised per­for­mance. The com­pany is still in the process of locat­ing a sup­plier for that trans­mis­sion; so, in order to get the car out the door, it is ship­ping with a single-speed trans­mis­sion that will be replaced for car own­ers by the end of the year.

Nonetheless, I found it a pretty amaz­ing story. There I was, stand­ing before a fully func­tional, fully elec­tric, sexy per­for­mance car, and it placed my faith firmly in a future in which peo­ple like me could sat­isfy their hunger for high per­for­mance, com­pletely free of emis­sion and fuel-consumption guilt.

For more infor­ma­tion visit www.teslamotors.com.