The Teslas S electric Sedan — inspected by Arnie

Uber-blogger Robert Scoble, formerly Microsoft’s internet evangelist, now with TV outfit Fast Company, says he is saving up for a Tesla Sedan, due for production release in two years.

Tesla Motors, which specializes in all-electric cars, has announced plans to start building the Model S — a five-passenger electric sedan with a 225-mile range — in the Bay Area of San Francisco.

Here are Robert’s upsides and downsides on the model :

Upsides?

1. Gas prices are probably going up from here, not down.
2. I want to be the first to have the sedan in my neighborhood.
3. When I took a ride in the first Tesla I learned that it can go more than 200 miles on just $3 worth of electricity.
4. Tim Ryan, Congressman, approves.
5. My vote, with my dollars, will help push other car companies into doing the same thing.
6. In just a year I put 20,000 on my Saturn Aura, and in two years we’ve put 40,000 miles on our BMW. Turning those miles into electric miles will make a big dent in our gas budgets.
7. It’ll be built in California and I like keeping my money in the state.

Downsides?

1. We’ll still need two cars, or rent cars, for when we need to go more than 200 miles in a day (recharging takes hours, not a few minutes like with gas). But that’s OK, we’ll still need two cars anyway, one for me and one for Maryam (in Half Moon Bay there are no public transportation options).
2. It’s expensive. More expensive than our BMW, which is a very expensive car for us.
3. It’s unproven technology and car. I remember when my dad bought a General Motors’ diesel in the late 1970s and that was a disaster of a car and soured our family on GM cars for more than 15 years.

We await developments with interest.

In an earlier post I mentioned that, sooner or later, we are going to have to get serious about electric cars. Fossil fuels will not last forever and will have to be replaced by an alternative, most likely hydrogen or electricity. GM’s Hy-Wire is an elegant combination of both that may well show the route to the future, but Tesla have the best answer yet from the electricity side of the debate - their roadster is completely electric and powered by their own design of battery.

The electric motor has obvious advantages in that it is clean, light and quiet; but it also presents us with great problems. Power similar to that provided by the internal combustion engine is necessary before we will consider it as a valid alternative; a big problem in the past has been that any practical electric vehicle will have to have a similar range to gasoline-driven cars before we will be persuaded to swap; and the origin of the power that recharges the batteries remains a stumbling block as long as we continue to get most of our electricity from power stations burning fossil fuels.

Tesla have solved the first two of these problems - their roadster accelerates to 60 mph in 4 seconds, surely enough power for anyone, and has a range of 250 miles, which is very close to the average for a standard production car. As for the power stations, I guess that will have to wait until we face the fact that nuclear power is the only viable answer.

If you want to learn more of the technical ingenuity behind the Tesla, visit the engineering page on their website. And, if you want one of next year’s model, get your order in now - the 2007 batch sold out in four months.

Update:

Here is a link to a video of the Tesla being driven. It also has more detail on features of the car but listen to it when in motion - that is the sound of tomorrow!

And another video just for the Brits…