Features
Volting ambition
0-60mph in four seconds? Enough range to get you from London to Plymouth? Pat Devereux has seen the future of cars, and he likes it
Imagine a Lotus Elise that can do 0-60 in four seconds, has a top end of over 130mph yet can return over 135mpg. Think how good you'd feel if that Elise also produced no harmful local emissions and hardly ever needed servicing.
You'd imagine there to be a catch and, of course, there is. This sports car of your green dreams is a plug-in electric vehicle...
I know that will have got a couple of groans from the audience. But bear with me here, as this isn't like any of those horribly cynical early efforts. The ones produced by global car companies trying to deflect attention from their tree-flattening SUV money-makers. This one's different. No, really, it is.
This one's called a Tesla, which I know doesn't mean much to you now, but give it a couple of years and it could. Why? Because the man who owns the company is called Elon Musk and he has a habit of taking a leftfield approach to big problems - and finding convincing answers that work.
'Tesla has to produce something we want rather than we need, hence the fabulous-looking Roadster'
If he hadn't had so much success already, you could reasonably accuse Elon Musk, Chairman of Tesla Motors, of being over ambitious. But he has, so you can't. Musk, who currently drives a McLaren F1, was one of the main brains behind PayPal, the pay-over-the-internet system that he flogged to eBay for $1.5bn in 2002.
The profit he came away with from that deal (and another previous big earner) funded the start-up of SpaceX (a low-cost space craft manufacturer that's now selling ships to NASA) and a solar power company, SolarCity. And now it's funding Tesla, too.
The aim of the company is to make cars that break our addiction to oil. And Musk knows that to do that, initially Tesla has to produce something we want rather than we need, hence the fabulous-looking Roadster.
But that will change as the rest of the range rolls out. After the £50,000 Roadster comes the £30,000 four-door family saloon in 2009 - of which Tesla anticipates selling in the region of 10,000. And after that comes the smaller £15,000 four-door saloon sometime in 2010/2011 - sales for that are predicted at 100,000 units a year.
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