Drooly...
More on the Tesla and others of it's kind...
Hot sports car with no gas tank
Electric roadster's maker says it does 130 mph -- but it doesn't come cheap
- Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 9, 2006
Rocket ship. Silent rocket ship. It's a black blur, streaking down a back road in San Carlos, cowing its muscle-bound, gas-gulping brethren.
This could be the future of electric cars.
The car is a Tesla Roadster, and it looks remarkably like a Lotus -- no surprise, because the Tesla is built on the Lotus assembly line in England. The surprise, though, is how much it is also like a small Ferrari and how utterly quiet it is.
We tend to associate sports cars with finely tuned, sexy exhaust-noise gasoline engines.
The Tesla is nothing like that. It is quiet and quick. The Tesla people say it will do zero to 60 mph in four seconds and will top out at 130 mph. And if its creators have their way, it will be a permanent niche in the eclectic and rarely successful field of electric-powered cars.
A handful of firms is out there, trying to build cars for this new, expensive niche. So far, it appears that Tesla is the closest to actually getting some cars on the road -- the Silicon Valley firm says 40 well-heeled customers have paid $100,000 each for a car, even though they won't get their new toys for at least a year. The buyers appear to be captivated by the fact that these electrics are completely different from relatively stodgy electric vehicles of the past.
And, indeed, they are different from the current darlings of the environmental set, the Toyota Prius, Honda Civic and other like-minded hybrids. A hybrid is a combination of gasoline engine and electric motor. The Tesla is a pure electric and has no tailpipe emissions.
The other day, Tesla's vice president of marketing, Mike Harrigan, took a reporter for an exciting if brief ride in the industrial area of San Carlos that Tesla Motors calls home. It's a tight fit in this car, much like getting into a Lotus. And it goes like a Lotus, too, but without the noise.
"We're trying to build the concept that an electric car can be beautiful and can be fun to drive," Harrigan said, shifting the Tesla up from its first to second (and top) gear. The car and the firm were named for Serbian electrical engineer Nikola Tesla, who invented alternating current, among a few hundred other things. He died in 1943, half a century before the truncated age of modern electric vehicles.
The short and dismal modern history of electric cars can be roughly divided into three parts:
First came the home-built specials -- shade-tree mechanics converted gasoline cars into anemic and ugly electrics that sort of ran but much of the time didn't.
Part two was the costly effort by the big auto manufacturers in the 1990s to make cars that would adhere to the California Air Resources Board's dictum of zero emissions.
The cars were made and, for the most part, were leased to consumers who, by most accounts, loved them.
But when the Air Resources Board weakened its zero-emissions rule three years ago, the manufacturers just as quickly closed their tiny electric vehicle operations, breathed a sigh of relief and lapsed into the comfort of their century-old internal combustion technology.
The third stage is what is starting to emerge now -- tapping into the lucrative luxury sports car market with a car that will operate on a charge from household current (no $3.50 a gallon premium gas) and won't require a multi-thousand-dollar periodic service.
Tesla was the brainchild of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who co-founded the Rocket e-book firm.
"When you make a handheld electronic device," Eberhard said, "you're obsessed with the energy density of your batteries. I was also looking for my next car."
Eventually, he got in touch with Tom Gage, president of AC Propulsion, a San Dimas (Los Angeles County) firm that had already made the TZero, a brutally fast electric-powered sports car. AC had made only a few cars, and Eberhard says he invested in the company and drove its lithium ion-battery-powered car for about three months "as a daily driver."
"That convinced me that if you set about making a real production car," Eberhard said, "you could make a nice car, a great sports car and a very efficient car." Tesla eventually would use some of AC Propulsion's electronics under license.
Eberhard and Tarpenning wrote a business plan and set about raising money. The big windfall came in April 2004 when PayPal co-founder Elon Musk agreed to invest about $30 million, half the $60 million Tesla eventually raised to get itself into the bigger league world of making cars.
Fine. Got the money. Now what?
"We didn't have a lot of automotive experience," Eberhard said, "and so we were looking for a partner. Lotus was the best fit. They have a history of building cars for other companies." Eberhard likes to stress that the Tesla is "not a Lotus Elise," a $43,000 gas-powered sports car, but concedes that the Tesla's "DNA comes from the Elise. We started with the technology of the Elise chassis and then re-architected it for our needs."
Eventually, Marketing Vice President Harrigan said, Tesla wants to sell 500 to 800 cars the first year and then ramp up to maybe 2,000 cars a year. Initially, Tesla says it will sell cars in five markets -- Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, New York and Miami. Harrigan says those five comprise 65 percent of the luxury sports car market. When it's time for service, a flatbed truck will pick up a customer's car and take it to the shop, where it will have its tires rotated and its electric system checked out. No oil and filter change. No tune-up. No valve adjustment.
Down the road, Tesla plans a four-door electric-powered sedan that would sell for somewhere between $50,000 and $65,000. But Tesla isn't the only one out there pushing these costly electrics.
The king of the heap, pricewise, is the Venturi Fetish, a speedy little electric sports car handmade in Monaco and selling for more than $600,000.
On a more reasonable front, firms in California and Washington state are developing a range of electric cars that they hope will cater to the burgeoning audience of people who are bored with their run-of-the-mill gas-powered Porsches and BMWs and will opt for something new and different.
Commuter Cars of Spokane, Wash., makes the Tango, something that looks like a four-wheeled motorcycle and was different enough to attract actor George Clooney as its first (and, so far, only) buyer. Commuter Cars Vice President Bryan Woodbury says the car will do zero to 60 in four seconds (like the Tesla) and, in the spirit of these exclusive wheels, costs about $108,000.
"It's the new high-power electronics that is making this possible," Woodbury said of the immense power he and other manufacturers are seeing in modern electric vehicle machinery. "Now you have electric cars blowing away Dodge Vipers on the drag strip. Electric cars are expensive and fast, because of better motor controllers and better batteries. People just aren't interested in slow cars."
In California, Universal Electric Vehicles of Thousands Oaks (Ventura County) makes a convertible sports car (the Spyder) that it says will, like the others, be doing that zero to 60 dance in around four seconds, according to Vice President Gregory Lane and will be relatively cheap -- under $70,000.
"This is a niche market," Lane said. "We're not after the general public. We have a list of potential buyers, and we're talking production of about 155 Spyders by the third year." Lane's wife, Diana, says the firm is trying to secure funding.
Phoenix Motorcars in Ojai figures its niche is SUVs and SUTs (sport utility truck), using bodies made in South Korea and electric motors built in Torrance. The vehicles will sell for about $45,000 each.
Perhaps the most ambitious project in all these may be the one mounted by Ian Wright, a New Zealander who used to work for Tesla and now has his own shop in Burlingame and is raising money.
"I want to build an extreme performance electric sports car," Wright said the other day, "faster than any production car you can buy for less than $1 million. This would be zero to 60 in three seconds."
Who's going to buy this $120,000 car?
"Those who like the latest tech toy," Wright said, "people who want to be seen."
"People have no idea. Once people who like fast cars get to ride in one of these, they say, 'Wow! This is cool. Faster than my Porsche. Faster than my Ferrari.' "
Just remember to plug it in after that ride.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tesla by the numbers:
Tesla Roadster: Zero to 60 mph in 4 seconds. Top speed, 130 mph.
Where it's made: Assembled by Lotus Cars, Hethel, Norwich, England, on same production line as Lotus Elise and other Lotus cars. Electric motor made by Tesla Motors in Taiwan.
Range on a full charge: 250 miles on EPA highway cycle.
Charge time: With home charging, 220 volts, 3 1/2 hours for completely discharged battery.
Price: Base price, $89,000; fully optioned (mobile charging, upgraded upholstery, removable hardtop, navigation system, additional cost for some colors), about $100,000.
Sources: Tesla Motors
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Electric cars originated in early 1900s
Electric cars have been around, in one form or another, since the turn of the century -- that would be the 19th to the 20th century. But they lost out to the internal combustion engine, driven by what used to be a cheap source of fuel -- gasoline.
For more than 100 years, electric vehicles have not made much of a dent in the automobile marketplace, but not for a lack of trying. In the late 20th century, there were a number of homemade, or small-factory-made electrics, and for a few years the major auto manufacturers made electric cars to comply with new California zero emission laws. The laws were watered down three years ago and the factories promptly scuttled their electric car program.
A more detailed explanation of all this can be seen in the new movie, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" and at the film's Web site, www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/.
The documentary passionately accuses the carmakers, the oil companies, the state and federal governments, and consumers, among others, of taking the nascent electric vehicle industry off life support just as it was starting to breathe on its own.
The theme throughout the movie is General Motors' initial development of the popular EV-1 electric car and then its merciless recalling and eventual crushing of nearly all EV-1 cars, once GM figured that having them on the road no longer mattered.
-- Michael Taylor
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4 seconds
(Time from 0 to 60 mph)
Tesla Roadster: $89,000
4 seconds
Ferrari F430 Spider: $188,000
Under 5 seconds*
Subaru Impreza WRX STi: $32,995
5.4 seconds
Mercedes-Benz SL550: $94,800
5.4 seconds
BMW 750i sedan: $75,800
Under 9 seconds
Toyota Camry hybrid: $26,480
* Actual specification was 0 to 62 mph in 4.8 seconds
Sources: Tesla Motors; www.roadandtrack.com; www.research.cars.com; www.forbesautos.com; www.caranddriver.com; www.edmunds.com; www.rsportscars.com; www.toyota.com
E-mail Michael Taylor at mtaylor@sfchronicle.com.
Page A - 1
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/08/09/MNGSSKDMBT1.DTL
Yummmmm....
~M
Hot sports car with no gas tank
Electric roadster's maker says it does 130 mph -- but it doesn't come cheap
- Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 9, 2006
Rocket ship. Silent rocket ship. It's a black blur, streaking down a back road in San Carlos, cowing its muscle-bound, gas-gulping brethren.
This could be the future of electric cars.
The car is a Tesla Roadster, and it looks remarkably like a Lotus -- no surprise, because the Tesla is built on the Lotus assembly line in England. The surprise, though, is how much it is also like a small Ferrari and how utterly quiet it is.
We tend to associate sports cars with finely tuned, sexy exhaust-noise gasoline engines.
The Tesla is nothing like that. It is quiet and quick. The Tesla people say it will do zero to 60 mph in four seconds and will top out at 130 mph. And if its creators have their way, it will be a permanent niche in the eclectic and rarely successful field of electric-powered cars.
A handful of firms is out there, trying to build cars for this new, expensive niche. So far, it appears that Tesla is the closest to actually getting some cars on the road -- the Silicon Valley firm says 40 well-heeled customers have paid $100,000 each for a car, even though they won't get their new toys for at least a year. The buyers appear to be captivated by the fact that these electrics are completely different from relatively stodgy electric vehicles of the past.
And, indeed, they are different from the current darlings of the environmental set, the Toyota Prius, Honda Civic and other like-minded hybrids. A hybrid is a combination of gasoline engine and electric motor. The Tesla is a pure electric and has no tailpipe emissions.
The other day, Tesla's vice president of marketing, Mike Harrigan, took a reporter for an exciting if brief ride in the industrial area of San Carlos that Tesla Motors calls home. It's a tight fit in this car, much like getting into a Lotus. And it goes like a Lotus, too, but without the noise.
"We're trying to build the concept that an electric car can be beautiful and can be fun to drive," Harrigan said, shifting the Tesla up from its first to second (and top) gear. The car and the firm were named for Serbian electrical engineer Nikola Tesla, who invented alternating current, among a few hundred other things. He died in 1943, half a century before the truncated age of modern electric vehicles.
The short and dismal modern history of electric cars can be roughly divided into three parts:
First came the home-built specials -- shade-tree mechanics converted gasoline cars into anemic and ugly electrics that sort of ran but much of the time didn't.
Part two was the costly effort by the big auto manufacturers in the 1990s to make cars that would adhere to the California Air Resources Board's dictum of zero emissions.
The cars were made and, for the most part, were leased to consumers who, by most accounts, loved them.
But when the Air Resources Board weakened its zero-emissions rule three years ago, the manufacturers just as quickly closed their tiny electric vehicle operations, breathed a sigh of relief and lapsed into the comfort of their century-old internal combustion technology.
The third stage is what is starting to emerge now -- tapping into the lucrative luxury sports car market with a car that will operate on a charge from household current (no $3.50 a gallon premium gas) and won't require a multi-thousand-dollar periodic service.
Tesla was the brainchild of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who co-founded the Rocket e-book firm.
"When you make a handheld electronic device," Eberhard said, "you're obsessed with the energy density of your batteries. I was also looking for my next car."
Eventually, he got in touch with Tom Gage, president of AC Propulsion, a San Dimas (Los Angeles County) firm that had already made the TZero, a brutally fast electric-powered sports car. AC had made only a few cars, and Eberhard says he invested in the company and drove its lithium ion-battery-powered car for about three months "as a daily driver."
"That convinced me that if you set about making a real production car," Eberhard said, "you could make a nice car, a great sports car and a very efficient car." Tesla eventually would use some of AC Propulsion's electronics under license.
Eberhard and Tarpenning wrote a business plan and set about raising money. The big windfall came in April 2004 when PayPal co-founder Elon Musk agreed to invest about $30 million, half the $60 million Tesla eventually raised to get itself into the bigger league world of making cars.
Fine. Got the money. Now what?
"We didn't have a lot of automotive experience," Eberhard said, "and so we were looking for a partner. Lotus was the best fit. They have a history of building cars for other companies." Eberhard likes to stress that the Tesla is "not a Lotus Elise," a $43,000 gas-powered sports car, but concedes that the Tesla's "DNA comes from the Elise. We started with the technology of the Elise chassis and then re-architected it for our needs."
Eventually, Marketing Vice President Harrigan said, Tesla wants to sell 500 to 800 cars the first year and then ramp up to maybe 2,000 cars a year. Initially, Tesla says it will sell cars in five markets -- Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, New York and Miami. Harrigan says those five comprise 65 percent of the luxury sports car market. When it's time for service, a flatbed truck will pick up a customer's car and take it to the shop, where it will have its tires rotated and its electric system checked out. No oil and filter change. No tune-up. No valve adjustment.
Down the road, Tesla plans a four-door electric-powered sedan that would sell for somewhere between $50,000 and $65,000. But Tesla isn't the only one out there pushing these costly electrics.
The king of the heap, pricewise, is the Venturi Fetish, a speedy little electric sports car handmade in Monaco and selling for more than $600,000.
On a more reasonable front, firms in California and Washington state are developing a range of electric cars that they hope will cater to the burgeoning audience of people who are bored with their run-of-the-mill gas-powered Porsches and BMWs and will opt for something new and different.
Commuter Cars of Spokane, Wash., makes the Tango, something that looks like a four-wheeled motorcycle and was different enough to attract actor George Clooney as its first (and, so far, only) buyer. Commuter Cars Vice President Bryan Woodbury says the car will do zero to 60 in four seconds (like the Tesla) and, in the spirit of these exclusive wheels, costs about $108,000.
"It's the new high-power electronics that is making this possible," Woodbury said of the immense power he and other manufacturers are seeing in modern electric vehicle machinery. "Now you have electric cars blowing away Dodge Vipers on the drag strip. Electric cars are expensive and fast, because of better motor controllers and better batteries. People just aren't interested in slow cars."
In California, Universal Electric Vehicles of Thousands Oaks (Ventura County) makes a convertible sports car (the Spyder) that it says will, like the others, be doing that zero to 60 dance in around four seconds, according to Vice President Gregory Lane and will be relatively cheap -- under $70,000.
"This is a niche market," Lane said. "We're not after the general public. We have a list of potential buyers, and we're talking production of about 155 Spyders by the third year." Lane's wife, Diana, says the firm is trying to secure funding.
Phoenix Motorcars in Ojai figures its niche is SUVs and SUTs (sport utility truck), using bodies made in South Korea and electric motors built in Torrance. The vehicles will sell for about $45,000 each.
Perhaps the most ambitious project in all these may be the one mounted by Ian Wright, a New Zealander who used to work for Tesla and now has his own shop in Burlingame and is raising money.
"I want to build an extreme performance electric sports car," Wright said the other day, "faster than any production car you can buy for less than $1 million. This would be zero to 60 in three seconds."
Who's going to buy this $120,000 car?
"Those who like the latest tech toy," Wright said, "people who want to be seen."
"People have no idea. Once people who like fast cars get to ride in one of these, they say, 'Wow! This is cool. Faster than my Porsche. Faster than my Ferrari.' "
Just remember to plug it in after that ride.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tesla by the numbers:
Tesla Roadster: Zero to 60 mph in 4 seconds. Top speed, 130 mph.
Where it's made: Assembled by Lotus Cars, Hethel, Norwich, England, on same production line as Lotus Elise and other Lotus cars. Electric motor made by Tesla Motors in Taiwan.
Range on a full charge: 250 miles on EPA highway cycle.
Charge time: With home charging, 220 volts, 3 1/2 hours for completely discharged battery.
Price: Base price, $89,000; fully optioned (mobile charging, upgraded upholstery, removable hardtop, navigation system, additional cost for some colors), about $100,000.
Sources: Tesla Motors
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Electric cars originated in early 1900s
Electric cars have been around, in one form or another, since the turn of the century -- that would be the 19th to the 20th century. But they lost out to the internal combustion engine, driven by what used to be a cheap source of fuel -- gasoline.
For more than 100 years, electric vehicles have not made much of a dent in the automobile marketplace, but not for a lack of trying. In the late 20th century, there were a number of homemade, or small-factory-made electrics, and for a few years the major auto manufacturers made electric cars to comply with new California zero emission laws. The laws were watered down three years ago and the factories promptly scuttled their electric car program.
A more detailed explanation of all this can be seen in the new movie, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" and at the film's Web site, www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/.
The documentary passionately accuses the carmakers, the oil companies, the state and federal governments, and consumers, among others, of taking the nascent electric vehicle industry off life support just as it was starting to breathe on its own.
The theme throughout the movie is General Motors' initial development of the popular EV-1 electric car and then its merciless recalling and eventual crushing of nearly all EV-1 cars, once GM figured that having them on the road no longer mattered.
-- Michael Taylor
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4 seconds
(Time from 0 to 60 mph)
Tesla Roadster: $89,000
4 seconds
Ferrari F430 Spider: $188,000
Under 5 seconds*
Subaru Impreza WRX STi: $32,995
5.4 seconds
Mercedes-Benz SL550: $94,800
5.4 seconds
BMW 750i sedan: $75,800
Under 9 seconds
Toyota Camry hybrid: $26,480
* Actual specification was 0 to 62 mph in 4.8 seconds
Sources: Tesla Motors; www.roadandtrack.com; www.research.cars.com; www.forbesautos.com; www.caranddriver.com; www.edmunds.com; www.rsportscars.com; www.toyota.com
E-mail Michael Taylor at mtaylor@sfchronicle.com.
Page A - 1
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/08/09/MNGSSKDMBT1.DTL
Yummmmm....
~M