Image: Tesla Motors
IN LATE JULY, Seattle landed one of only six Tesla Motors showrooms in the country, where the early-adopting environmentalist with a lead foot can buy the Roadster, an all-electric sports car that can hit 125 miles per hour. The little freeway fireball will set you back $109,000, which the company calls an investment in the future of affordable gas-free transportation. But these days savvy spenders want more than warm fuzzies for their money. Here’s what else they get.
CHARGE PORT It looks like a gas tank, but the little round door behind the driver’s side window is actually a portal to petrol-free driving. An overnight charge—even from a standard 120-volt outlet—will last 244 miles while bumping your electricity bill by only about $4.35.
BATTERY Without an internal-combustion engine to drive its motor, the Roadster relies exclusively on a half-ton bank of 6,800 lithium-ion batteries, like the kind in your laptop. A fitting fuel source for a car designed by tech-industry geeks, sure, but the power it produces is decidedly ungeeky: 0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds.
TRANSMISSION Your standard manual transmission has five gears, plus reverse. The Roadster’s tranny has one—including reverse. (Push the “drive” button, and the motor spins forward. Push the “reverse” button, and it instantly reverses direction.) The upside: You’ll never grind a gear or stall at a stop light. The downside: That distinctive, primal lurch you’ve grown accustomed to feeling between first and second is gone.
BRAKES Stop-and-go city driving is a fuel-efficiency killer for gas-powered cars, but the Roadster thrives on it. Take your foot off the accelerator and the motor actually becomes a generator, sending a surge of juice back to the battery bank and extending the charge. Even better: Because the power is instantly diverted, deceleration is dramatic and a full stop only takes a tap of the brakes.
MOTOR It doesn’t look like much, but the motor is all muscle. Even at 115 pounds—about a fifth of what some high-performance car engines weigh—and no bigger than a watermelon, the motor produces enough torque when launching from a dead stop to paste passengers to their seats.
Car Tech
In a lot of ways, Tesla’s Roadster is the perfect Seattle ride. Born in a research lab (instead of on an assembly line), stacked with techie features (like a sweet speed- and power-limiting Valet Mode), insanely eco-friendly (244 miles per $4.35 charge). But in one very important way, it’s not: Its lusty Lotus-inspired profile purrs, “My owner is loaded”—and with a sticker price of $109,000, that ain’t far from the truth. So who, in painfully modest Seattle, could stomach piloting such an immodest means of transport? “I actually saw the visibility of the car as a positive,” says Tom Burt, a local tech firm employee and one of only 22 Roadster owners in Washington State. Burt’s license-plate frame shouts, “Electric Cars Kick Ass,” but he swears he’s just a techno-evangelist. “I spend a lot of time talking to people in ferry lines and parking lots about the technology because I want everyone to understand that the vast majority of us could be driving electric cars really soon.” And by “really soon,” we assume he means “about the same time 401(k)s recover their full value.”
Published in the The Ultimate Guide to Northwest Beaches issue of Seattle Met.
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