Quentin Willson, Zac Goldsmith & Carl Honore test drive the Tesla Roadster Sport at Eco-Rally 2009
Submitted by Tesla Motors on 8 June, 2009 - 07:28
What if an electric sports car could beat a Ferrari
The Tesla Roadster offers double the efficiency of popular hybrid cars, while generating one-third of the CO2. Compare the Tesla Roadster against the average sport cars and the results get better still: it is six times as efficient and produces one-tenth the pollution, with the same performance & acceleration.
Astonishingly quick. 0 - 60 arrives in a neck-snapping 3.9s, a Ferrari-beating figure that's courtesy of a 185kW electric motor that whirrs like a Lear jet.
- Quentin Willson
| Benefits: | No congestion charge and just a few quid to re-charge. In the US, you're even allowed to drive your EV in a carpool lane regardless of passengers. |
| Technology: | Lightweight, recyclable chassis, energy-saving LED tail lights, lithium-ion battery pack with 100,000 mi lifecycle, regenerative braking. It's been described by some as the most exciting thing to happen to the motor car since the V12 engine. |
| Emissions: | potentially zero - if charged by renewable, non fossil electricity. |
| Recharge: | Full charge in as little as 3.5 hrs |
Gentleman, charge your batteries!
On a green tariff such as the one offered by Southern Electric, the Tesla is a mean, green machine that left everyone drooling all the way from Brighton to London! Several Tesla customers in the US have gone a step further and installed solar panels to charge their cars off-grid.
The Tesla Roadster's elegantly designed powertrain consists of just the four main components
The Tesla Roadster's battery pack — the car's "fuel tank" — represents the biggest innovation in the Tesla Roadster and is one of the largest and most advanced battery packs in the world. It's light, durable, recyclable, and provides more range than any other production electric vehicle in history.
Lithium ion batteries are classified by the US federal government as non-hazardous waste and are safe for disposal in the normal municipal waste stream. However, even a completely dead battery pack contains valuable, recoverable materials that can be sold back to recycling companies for cash. Tesla aims to include the cost of recycling in the purchase price of each car.
Sports cars have one main purpose: to please Top Gear presenters... and therefore, entertain us on a Sunday night. If you then decide to (and can afford to) buy one, it'll mostly be used to express your wealth and capabilities to the opposite sex. This is perfectly achieved by cruising very slowly through a busy city centre at night.
The Tesla Roadster has the added bonus of expressing your sensitive, planet-loving side, all whilst avoiding road tax and congestion charges. You're also not pumping out any offensive emissions... but that's where the problem lies. No-one can hear you preen - you can't blip the throttle to get everyone's attention. Having said that, the huge battery-pack can be put to good use powering the stereo - allowing you to further express your personality through sharing your favourite MP3s. Alternatively, you can opt for the Brabus tuning with a rumbling V8 soundtrack!
For the odd track day, you can adjust the toe-in and camber, fit some racing tyres and will probably go fast enough to scare yourself before the battery goes flat.
I drove 65 miles [from Brighton to London via Greenwich], exploring the upper register of the Tesla's performance, and used a little over a quarter of the battery's charge. At £93k it's impossibly expensive, but that's not the point. What makes this car so remarkable is that you can buy it right now. This is landmark propulsion that won't just clean the air and stop oil wars, it'll free the world from the shackles of OPEC and the skulduggery of speculating spivs. Bring it on. |
...It’s all out of ideas at 125mph, but the speed it gets there is quite literally electrifying... Through the corners things are less rosy. To minimise rolling resistance and therefore increase range, the wheels have no toe-in or camber [but this can be changed if you want use it for racing - ed]. This affects the handling. So too does the sheer weight of the 6,831 laptop batteries, all of which have to be constantly cooled. But slightly wonky handling is nothing compared with this car’s big problems. First of all, it costs £90,000. This means it is three times more than the Lotus Elise. Of course, it will not be expensive to run. Filling a normal Elise with petrol costs £40. Filling a Tesla with cheap-rate electricity costs just £3.50. And that’s enough to take you — let’s be fair — somewhere between 55 and 200 miles, depending on how you drive... ...In the fullness of time, I have no doubt that the Tesla can be honed and chiselled and developed to a point where the problems are gone. But time is one thing a car such as this does not have. Honda and Ford are surging onwards with hydrogen cars, which don’t need charging, can be fuelled normally and are completely green. The biggest problem, then, with the Tesla is not that it doesn’t work. It’s that even if it did, it would be driving down the wrong road. |
Astonishingly quick 0 - 60 comes arrives in a neck-snapping 3.9s, a Ferrari-beating figure that's courtesy of a 185kW electric motor that whirrs like a Lear jet.
Tesla's response to the Top Gear test
Thanks to The Stig's impressive turn behind the wheel, the Tesla Roadster gets a higher ranking in Top Gear's performance board than a Porsche 911 GT3. Jeremy Clarkson, a die-hard "petrol head" with a clear bias against green cars generally, said that it must be "snowing in hell" because he had such a great time driving the Roadster and now considers himself a "volt head" thanks to the Roadster's amazing performance. This is amazingly high praise from Clarkson, whose entire schtick is to savage even his most beloved petrol-guzzling sports cars.
However, I would like to clarify a couple things. Never at any time did Clarkson or any of the Top Gear drivers run out of charge. In fact, they never got below 20 percent charge in either car; they never had to push a car off the track because of lack of charge or a fault. (It's unclear why they were pushing one into a garage in the video; I'll refrain from speculating about their motives.)
The "brake failure" Clarkson mentions was solely a blown fuse; a service technician replaced the Roadster's pump and it was back up and running immediately. They were never without a car, and the Top Gear testing did not put the Roadster's reliability or safety in question whatsoever. Again, I'm going to leave out comments as to why the good folks at Top Gear might have mischaracterized the blown fuse as a brake failure, which is was decidedly not.
I am also unclear as to why Clarkson said it took 16 hours to recharge the Roadster without qualifying that statement at all. The vast majority of people who have taken delivery of their Roadsters (and there are more than 100 of them now) have much faster systems that recharge from dead to full in as little as 3.5 hours.
Rachel Konrad
Senior Communications Manager
Tesla Motors Inc.
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