Tesla Roadsters now rolling off production line
The world's hippest eco-chic status symbol--the Tesla Roadster--is finally leaving the factory.
The all-electric Tesla Roadsters, priced around $100,000, are now shipping, company president and CEO Ze'ev Drori told customers on Friday. The letter was reprinted on the company blog on Saturday.
One of the 27 Tesla Roadsters undergoing final assembly in the company's Menlo Park, Calif., outlet.
(Credit: Tesla Motors)Drori said Tesla has "broken the logjam," beginning to manufacture Roadsters at a low volume, meaning that it will deliver about four a week. There are now about 27 Roadsters in various stages of assembly, he said.
Production, done at a Lotus plant in the United Kingdom, will remain low until September, when the company starts to incorporate its second drivetrain, Powertrain 1.5, designed to give the car better performance.
In December, the goal is to produce 100 Roadsters a month.
It's a dose of good news for Tesla's well-heeled customers, who have had to endure months of delays.
Tesla has had both technological challenges in making an all-electric car that runs on lithium-ion batteries, as well as a management turmoil, detailed in great detail in this recent Fortune report.
Click on the image to see a photo gallery of the first Roadsters in production.
(Credit: Corinne Schulz/CNET Networks)Tesla's largest investor, PayPal founder Elon Musk, took over control of the company last year and ousted founder Martin Eberhard as the carmaker transitioned from technological development to product shipping.
Tesla also recently named former Chrysler executive Mike Donoughe as executive vice president of vehicle engineering and manufacturing.
Tesla is, perhaps, the most high-profile green-tech company to emerge from a swell of activity in the past four years. Its problems illustrate some of the challenges in energy technology start-ups.
Unlike start-ups trying to sell to, say, electric utilities, Tesla's wealthy, techno-savvy clients are willing to shoulder some of the risk of a new product.
Drori also announced in the company blog that Tesla has opened its second store in Menlo Park, Calif., replicating the high-touch sales environment of its first store in Los Angeles. Showrooms in New York, Chicago, Miami, and Seattle are planned as well.
The Roaster will have a range of 220 miles per charge and the mileage equivalent of 135 mpg. It can go from standing still to 60 mph in less than 4 seconds.
The company is also planning to make an all-electric sedan priced at about $60,000.
Updated on July 16 with correction to the rate at which Tesla plans to make Roadsters later this year.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
did you even read the article? The car is powered by electricity not gas! Also, Tesla is not a BIG US manufacturer!!!! The company is new and is working on putting out 4 cars a week!!! You call that big? And since when is Lotus American? Read the article first! Your reading comprehension skills are pathetic.
After all, GM already HAD the all electric EV produced (but LEASED only) in '96. So what did they do after just a few years? They joined the Oil co's. and Feds leveraging CA to quash it's planned law (for a certain % zero emission vehicles) and RECALLED ALL of it's OWN EV's leasers from it's customer base!! (source documentary, "Who Killed the Electric Car?")
Not only is Detroit caught with it's pants down. but the big 3 have completely left the American pubic in the lurch for DELIBERATELY ignoring viable technological alternative fuel source vehicles FOR OVER 30 YEARS now...
GM Ford, and Chrysler have only themselves to blame for letting this occur.
Tesla is DELIVERING on the "CAN DO" American innovation that's been a big part of what's made this country great.
Go for it Tesla !!
http://www.gm-volt.com
The earliest we'll see a new gen of "modern" fuel-efficient cars will be around 2011-12.
Realistically, we won't see any volume sales of any *mainstream* electric (or plug-in hybrid/fuel-cell, whatever) car for about ten years. The tech isn't really there. Tesla is actually doing well if they get to 100 cars a week (5000 per year) and actually sell them. That would put them in Dodge Viper (peak sales) territory.
That's a far cry from Accord/Camry (200,000 a year each in the US).
Baby steps is all we can expect; there are no silver bullets to this problem.
Not nearly as bad as yours, it would seem. Clearly yacahuma was wishing them the best of luck and NOT in a sarcastic way (as you so quickly assumed). And yacahuma was bashing the big 3 US manufacturers (they just had a typo and didn't pluralize "manufacturer", and mispluralized "these" as "this"), NOT Tesla which is, by your own comments, not big and not American. Seems pretty obvious to me what they were getting at.
Maybe you need to read things through a FEW times before being so quick to flame. So yacahuma's first language is probably not English. So sue them.
I like Tesla but cannot afford it. I hope we will have electric cars that are sub-30K, so that the country can move towards them instead of relying on gasoline.
Personally I'd prefer a transportation system that could utilize domestic energy sources and was less exposed the vagaries of international politics and was far more efficient than burning a flammable liquid to propel me down the road.
That's to say there aren't reasons to be skeptical of the electric car's mainstream acceptance. I think batteries are just now on the cusp of being well suited to personal transportation and are still prohibitively expensive for the energy storage they offer. But to try and write battery electric vehicles off from a physics standpoint is being silly.
Get it right buddy....
Like other high performance sports cars, this was not designed for penny pinching misers. It was designed for well-off folks who want high performance and the latest technological marvel, and who like the idea of a clean green mean machine.
Tesla is using their experience to develop a less expensive sedan for about $60K, and a third model to be about $30K.
Could be wrong though.
The bigger question is: how wise is the lithium battery technology? Is the environment gain going to be squelshed by the cost of making/disposing of batteries?
The ingredients for lithium batteries are fairly common and affordable, the cost is mainly in manufacturing. The batteries Tesla is using have no heavy metals like lead or cadmium, are considered nontoxic and can be landfilled safely. But it is cost effective to recycle them, and Tesla has already run successful tests on recycling proceedures.
http://www.crypt.alturl.com/
A) Depending on where you live and have access to, the environmental cost of producing electricity may be less than what it takes to produce, transport, and burn gasoline.
B) This is a *sports car*. 0-60mph in ~4 seconds. Most cars with that kind of acceleration cost $ and have bad to horrible fuel mileage.
Its not perfect, but Tesla is making a good move in creating demand for alternative forms of powering vehicles.
- by dirty55409 December 4, 2008 9:08 AM PST
- dang this is an old article but I have three words for tesla.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(27 Comments)LITHIUM-IRON-PHOSPHATE
yep there is what will be in your future if you want to stay afloat. Less likely to explode or start on fire, quicker to charge, lighter per cell, and a higher capacity per cell so you get 3/4 the weight and 25% at least more power!