Today I visited teslamotors.com and was impressed! Tesla Motors is an up and coming California startup developing and producing the first truly high performance electric sports car (see http://www.teslamotors.com/index.php?js_enabled=1 ). The car, the Tesla Roadster, is making quite a stir. The Tesla Roadster is capable of 0-60 acceleration in close to 4.0 seconds and has the completely cool sports car look, matching its world-class performance. The look and performance place it in the same rarefied strata as legendary $300,000 autos but at a fraction (albeit still not cheap) of the cost.
The company takes its name from Nikola Tesla, the late 19th and early 20th century inventor noted for first demonstrating and advocating alternating current (AC) electricity, engaging in a long debate with Edison (who advocated direct current DC) with AC prevailing.
This car is really a step in the right direction and I think a great example of the kind of thinking we need as our economy makes the transition to 21st century products and business models. I think this bit of text form the company web site states their case very well:
Electric “Punishment Cars”
Historically, it seemed to us that electric cars had been designed by people who thought we really shouldn‘t be driving at all - but if we must, we should suffer every minute of it. Electric cars have had terrible range and embarrassing styling. To those who say electric cars have been tried and failed we say, of course electric cars won‘t catch on if no one actually wants to drive them.
I could not agree more – rather than rely upon reductive “consumer side” solutions that would force ugly and totally “un-cool” cars into the market, these folks are really onto something by creating a desirable product, while most likely being on the way to increased wealth themselves.