The $100K Tesla Roadster delayed?

The Tesla Roadster is an electric sports car inspired by the Lotus Elise from UK. Unlike its other electric predecessors, the Tesla Roadster is a truly trendy and high performance sports car that can zip from 0-60 in 4 secs flat. With a top speed of 130 mph, would you believe that the Roadster is actually faster than the Lotus and delivers a mileage of 250 miles on a single charge of its lithium-ion battery? The Roadster is purely an electric car using battery power as the source of power.

The car has a long line of celebrities and the ultra rich who are willing to dole out over $100,000 to buy one . Among them are, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, actors Matt Damon and George Clooney and California governor Arnold Swarzenegger. The series of first 100 to be built and delivered in 2008, called the “Signature One Hundred” series were pre-sold in two weeks. The company is setting up service centers in just five major markets — Northern California, Southern California, New York, Florida and Chicago. If you are not in one of the five major markets, you will have to shell out an extra $10,000 fee for service. Tesla initially does not plan to sell the Roadster outside of the continental U.S.

Jay Leno recently test drove the car and wrote this in his review:

“People think that if you’re a car enthusiast you have something against electric cars. Not in the least. To me the nice thing about electric vehicles is, if nothing else, they free up the gasoline for our other cars.

I think many car enthusiasts see the future as one where they will use some kind of electric car or hydrogen car during the week and will save their sports cars for the weekend, just as you would play golf or football at the weekend.

What Tesla, an American company that has made an electric version of the very British Lotus Elise, has done is find a way to enjoy a sports car all week long and be green.”

Tesla Motors was co-founded by Martin Eberhard, an electrical engineer who wanted to develop an electric car that people would love to drive. The company is named after Nikola Tesla, the inventor of the first induction motor. Martin formed a partnership with Lotus to come up with a joint design of the car. Instead of using the commercially available Nickel Metal Hydride batteries that are found in other hybrids on the market, Tesla created it’s own battery pack using 6831 rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are the same type used in laptops and are known to hold the charge much longer than their Nickel metal hydride counterparts. Tesla is now licensing its lithium-ion battery technology to other electric car manufacturers, with Norwegian car company, Think as the first customer.

Recently, the company announced a management change with Martin Eberhard stepping down as the CEO and assuming the role of President of Technology. Michael Marks, former CEO of Flextronics has been named as the CEO of Tesla. With this change in management, there are speculations that the Roadster will be delayed by several months. If true, all those who deposited $100K for their Roadster will have to wait patiently for a few more months.