The Tesla Roadster Sport, a child of Silicon Valley, financed by 38 year old PayPal billionaire Elon Musk, it is the first fully electric supercar with commercial viability. An unconventional motoring start-up founded by Californian software engineer Martin Eberhard.

Eberhard’s aim was to develop a car that ran on sustainable energy while, unlike all its competitors, being practical enough to use every day. The difficulty was developing the technology and putting it in a car everybody could afford. The answer was simple; they decided that their first venture would have to start out like the high tech gadgets, hyped-up, over priced and rare, becoming cheaper with time and volume. This would mean that the first line of consumers would fund the development of the company.

The first concept was born, a supercar to prove that green cars can be sexy, sporty and practical. Tesla went about designing the battery and engine system whist outsourcing the design and manufacture of the car itself to British legends Lotus.

The cars were shipped from Norfolk to California where the engines were installed and charged bringing the final cost of the car to around 80,000. It’s not the most expensive supercar in the world but considering the investment in the future of the motor industry, some are considering a steal.

The company was backed by South African billionaire Elon Musk, who sold PayPal to eBay; he was currently investing in commercial rocket science with an aim to put men on mars. Musk had strong ties with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin who also invested in the company, ties to a film company gave Tesla a chance to market the car to George Clooney, who in turn convinced Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and a list of celebrities to rival the Oscars. With celebrity endorsement came publicity and the company was the darling of the ‘cleantech’ industry.

The car went into production last year and currently has a waiting list of over 1000 including all of the investors along with a’ who’s-who’ of the rich and famous as jumping on the eco-wagon becomes increasingly fashionable.

Official testing has shown the Roadster can achieve 0-60 in 3.7 seconds with a limited top speed of 125mph, this means it can out-drag a Ferrari while keeping you pinned in your seat from the instance you touch the pedal, all in absolute silence.

Tesla say they plan on selling the intellectual property for their engines to some of the European car giants which should cause a rise in electric car technology, meaning even if your next car isn’t electric, the one after probably will be.

Although the Tesla is capable of speeding, it’s electronic speed limiter complies with motoring law.

categories: cars,motoring,driving,speeding,electric,hybrid,sustainable,motor industry

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Found a great piece (well, with some help from some Facebook friends at Beckerman PR) on the real cost of offshore wind turbines versus offshore oil platforms in Forbes.

Karl Burkart’s piece asks, “How many offshore wind turbines could have been installed for the cost of one $10 billion Deepwater Horizon?,” the platform that sank and unleashed the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history:

How many turbines can $10 billion buy?

A typical American drives 12,000 miles per year. The latest plug-in electric vehicles (like the much-anticipated Tesla sedan) use about 370 watt-hours per mile. The U.S. driver’s 12,000 miles x .37 = 4,440 kilowatts per year. Divide 33 billion by 4,440 kilowatts and you get about 7.4 million electric vehicles that could be powered each year with a $10 billion wind investment.

Now while the piece does admit that the Deepwater Horizon well would have fueled more cars … 18.2 million vehicles per year … it does it at a higher cost per mile: 13.6 cents/mile for petroleum and only 3.7 cents/mile for electric vehicles running on wind-generated power.

If you figure that 7.4 million Americans would be saving $1,188 per year, that is about $8.8 billion going back into the U.S. economy rather than into the grubby hands of foreign oil companies like BP.

And that’s not even counting cleaning up the occasional mess created by Big Oil.

So the next time someone tries to tell you that wind energy is too expensive, just ask them: just how high of a price should we continue to pay for non-renewable oil?

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