Here comes the electric car for boy racers

The Sunday Times
June 21, 2009

Ray Hutton

IT is perhaps a sign of the times. An electric-car maker has taken over a showroom in London’s Knightsbridge that once sold Aston Martins and more recently housed a £16,000-a-year supercar club.
The supercar connection is not inappropriate because the building’s occupant is Tesla, the American company whose all-electric Roadster does 125mph, accelerates like a Ferrari, and sells for £94,000.
Tesla recently delivered its 500th zero-emissions sports car in America. Owners include George Clooney, Dustin Hoff-man and Leonardo DiCaprio. The London sales and service centre is its first overseas.
The showroom will be opened this week by Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal and a pioneer in space tourism, who describes himself as the “product architect” of the electric-car company. It will coincide with the launch of a special signature edition of the first 250 Tesla Roadsters for Europe.
Tesla has beaten the big car manufacturers to the market with a fully-fledged electric car with high performance and a long range (200 miles) between battery charges. A start-up from the hotbed of electronics, Silicon Valley in California, it took a short cut by using the chassis of the Lotus Elise.
Cars for America are built by Lotus at Hethel, Norfolk, and transported to California for the installation of the 250bhp electric motor, lithium-ion battery pack and electronic control system.
Teslas for all European markets will be supplied complete from Lotus but, initially, only in left-hand drive. Several big car makers, that are preparing to launch plug-in electric cars in 2011 and beyond, are scornful of Tesla’s battery system, which instead of using pur-pose-made lithium-ion cells, is made up of no fewer than 6,831 laptop batteries. Charging the batteries takes 16 hours from a 13-amp household electricity supply.
Daimler, the maker of Mer-cedes-Benz cars, is not among Tesla’s detractors, having taken a 10% stake. The companies have been working together since early last year to adapt the battery system for a pilot electric Smart car that will appear later this year. Mercedes will start series production of electric Smart and Mercedes models in 2012.
Next year, Tesla will offer British buyers a cheaper base model Roadster and a faster Roadster Sport with a 300bhp electric motor. A second model, the Tesla S, a four-door electric coupé designed from scratch and built in America, is scheduled for 2011.
Larger production – 20,000 cars a year – and improvements in battery efficiency and cost, should bring down the price of the S model to nearer £40,000.
From 2011, the British government has pledged to subsi-dise the purchase of an electric car by up to £5,000. By then, Tesla will have competition from some of the biggest names in motoring, but today, the Roadster stands alone as an electric car suitable for more than town use and commuting and has the bonus of enthusiast appeal.
So boy racers can go green – if they can afford it.