Bruno Giussani is a writer, the European Director of the 
So the red roadster in the picture is the much-awaited Tesla electric car, which was unveiled today: it that can go from zero to 100 km/hour in four or so seconds - as fast as the Ferrari Testarossa - and has an autonomy of 400 km - comparable to that of an average car running on gasoline.
With the price of oil up and climate change a fact that proves itself daily, developers of electric cars (along of cars powered by hydrogen and ethanol and hybrids) are in a race to market.
Tesla Motors is a Silicon Valley startup backed by some of the founders of Google, PayPal and eBay, and their approach is the opposite of what electric cars have been so far. They designed a sports car that will sell for between 85'000 and 100'000 USD: unaffordable for most (but starting at the top-end rather than at the low-end has often been the way to get breakthrough products to market). Martin Eberhard, the CEO, writes in a blog post that "if you look at the numbers, it is very clear that an electric car is the cleanest and most efficient kind of car in existence", yet so far most have failed because "they were designed by and for people who fundamentally don’t think we should drive". They were "unappealing electric punishment cars" (example). Some were better, but still had "limited range, limited performance, and limited appeal". At Tesla "we love to drive". Hence they worked on optimizing the design not for cheap, but for driving range, performance, and easthetics.
A big part of the cost goes towards the batteries: the Tesla has 6831 lithium-ion batteries (like those used in laptop computers) wired together in a network, giving the roadster 248 horsepower and a top speed of over 200 km/ and a fuel efficiency of about 0.5 cents of an euro per km. Tesla unveiled the car last night - it will be much discussed in the coming days: start with this story by Wired - but manufacturing (in England) has not yet started, and the first deliveries are expected by next Summer.
[tags: Tesla Tesla Motors electric car]
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