Once you're folded into the cozy cockpit of the 2007 Tesla Roadster, there’s not a lot left to do but twist the key to turn on the system, slide the twin-gate shifter (one gate for forward and reverse, the other for neutral and two forward gears) into gear, and stand on the long pedal. What follows is one of the great driving experiences of the twenty-first century, which is exactly where this car belongs.
The Tesla—named for the Serbian-American electrical pioneer who popularized alternating current, introduced remote control, and is recognized by the U.S. Patent Office as the inventor of radio—is powered by electricity, not reciprocating pistons, so the power delivery is immediate, silent, and huge.
By the time your Heuer Monaco has ticked four times, you are going sixty miles per hour, and all you can hear is a faint whine in the background, the moist coastal air rushing over the windshield, and the blood pounding in your ears as you go faster and faster through the huge trees that surround Monterey’s 17 Mile Drive. No roar, no blat, no thunder, just the sound of 6831 tiny lithium-ion batteries feeding power to a 250-horsepower electric motor. In the relative silence, the sensation of speed goes up, way up, until you can hear the tires grabbing California for all they’re worth, slamming the car through corner after corner on a near-race-quality suspension system that feels like a Lotus Elise.
It feels like a Lotus in fast corners because underneath the slick carbon-fiber body of the Tesla there is most of a Lotus Elise chassis. Lotus will be building the car for Tesla at its factory in Hethel, England. They won the contract to design the car after a five-way studio competition, and the slick design speaks for itself.
If you’ve ever driven an Elise, you know that it connects to the human mind and hands better than almost anything out there. That is exactly the feeling you get driving the Tesla through the woods. It seems to know where you want to go, and how fast, before you do. It doesn’t run out of acceleration until it reaches 130 mph, a number never before connected in the same sentence to a road-going electric car. The tachometer on the Tesla reads like the tach on a Japanese super bike: 15,000 rpm, with a redline at a mere 13,500.
We are driving the Tesla Roadster during the Pebble Beach Concours weekend, and on this afternoon the traffic that normally clogs the famous 17 Mile Drive has disappeared. This allows us to keep up a very high average speed as we fire questions, without having to shout, at Mike Harrigan, our guide to all things Tesla, and negotiate to keep the car between the trees, just as Phil Hill did in his Jaguar to win the first Pebble Beach race through the woods in 1950.
Because the Tesla has a two-speed manual transmission with a very simple fore-aft shifter, and because of the electric motor’s torque characteristics, it’s damn near as quick leaving it in second gear as it is shifting from first to second (it was locked in second for our test drive). First gear is 4.2:1, second is 2.17:1, with a final drive ratio of 3.41:1. Reverse simply reverses the direction of the motor in either gear. The net result is pure driving pleasure; since you’re not constantly up- and downshifting through a typical six-speed sports-car box, you can keep your hands on the wheel, your eyes on the road, and your foot to the floor.
As soon as you lift off the pedal, or when you apply the brakes, the electric motor becomes a generator and adds power back into the battery pack. The antilock brakes are enormous for the car’s weight and size—they’re cross-drilled 11.8-inch front and 12.2-inch rear discs with curved-vane ventilation, AP Racing twin-piston fixed front calipers, and Brembo single-piston sliding rear calipers—so the lightweight carbon-fiber Tesla will stop when and where you want it to. And fade isn’t going to be a problem.
When the Tesla engineers went shopping for a high-performance tire for their silent-running sports car, they hooked up with Yokohama Tire, which supplied an unusual Advan Neova rubber set for the car: narrow 175/55R-16 steering tires in front and fat 225/45R-17 traction tires in the rear, all of which deliver absurd cornering power with the bonus of delivering very low rolling resistance, a must for an electric car if it is to deliver a practical, meaningful operating range. The Tesla, in prototype form, has a range of 250 miles, under EPA highway test conditions. That’s higher than any previous production electric vehicle and roughly equivalent to 135 miles per gallon and an operating cost of about a penny a mile.
This car, on these tires, sticks better than any electric car before it and most of the two-seaters remotely in its class. Set up as it is, it has 40/60 front-to-rear weight distribution on a Lotus upper- and lower-wishbone suspension with coaxial coil springs and shock absorbers at the front and rear. It has a stabilizer bar in the front, and one is to be added at the rear later (it crashes a bit over hard bumps at the rear, so adding a bar and softening the spring rates should cure that, Harrigan says).
There are a few options, including a navigation system, a portable charging system, a hard-top section painted body color to replace the standard black soft-top insert, an Apple iPod docking station that allows full control of the unit from the car’s stereo system, an upgraded leather interior, a top-of-the-line Bose stereo system, and a buyer’s choice of XM or Sirius satellite radio.
Living with a Tesla will require that you hire a licensed electrician to install the Tesla home charging unit in your garage or on the side of your house. The charging system is foolproof, with built-in heat and smoke detectors; and it won’t transmit electricity until after it is plugged in, so it’s childproof.
The optional portable charging system fits in the trunk, with all the popular plug configurations built in. It can use any 110- or 220-volt outlet. Charging time from dead to full is a mere three and a half hours. The charging system also has a built-in battery heater, so the car will start and run normally in cold weather. The lithium-ion batteries are both replaceable and recyclable, and Tesla says they should last 100,000 miles. The company even offers a solar charging option with excess power available to your home.
If you decide to spend your time and money on a Tesla, there are some things you should know. First, the company is not setting up a national dealer network. It will sell cars directly from its headquarters in San Carlos, California, and will pick up and deliver cars that need servicing as long as they’re within a sixty-mile radius of HQ. Beyond that, charges will be levied. For the time being, that’s the retail setup, with stores and service centers planned for New York, Chicago, and Miami. If you don’t live in one of those four places, you will have to pay an additional $10,000 transportation fee so Tesla will deliver and pick up your car to and from wherever you happen to live. Teslas will be sold only in the contiguous forty-eight states. Orders will be taken in early 2007 for delivery in the third quarter.
At this early stage, the price is $89,000 for the base car, and it can run up to $100,000 with all of the factory options installed. If you want to be the greenest guy with the fastest car, that’s what you’ll have to pay.
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