High-Performance, No-Emission Cars

Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs Race To Bring Electric Sports Cars To Market

(AP) 
"The battery technology has improved," said Ron Freund, chairman of the Electric Auto Association in Palo Alto. "They keep getting better. They last longer, they're smaller and they charge faster."

The success of Toyota's Prius and other hybrids has shown there's a market for eco-friendly cars. Page and Brin, Google's billionaire founders, are known to drive Priuses.

But Tesla's Eberhard thinks the Prius is "terrifically ugly" and believes other wealthy car enthusiasts feel the same way.

In Tesla's workshop about 20 miles south of San Francisco, Eberhard and Tarpenning offered a glimpse of their first model — a sleek two-seater called the Roadster that resembles a Lotus Elise — but would not allow photographs. They plan to unveil it at an event for prospective buyers next month in Santa Monica.

"We're building a car for people who like to drive," Eberhard said. "This is not a punishment car."

To build the Roadster, Tesla engineers designed a sophisticated battery system with more than 8,000 lithium-ion cells and a network of computers to control them, Eberhard said. They also built an electric motor that is more than twice as powerful as earlier electric vehicles.

The Roadster will be able to drive about 250 miles on a single three-hour charge, drive up to 135 miles per hour and accelerate from zero to 60 in four seconds, Eberhard said. It will cost between $85,000 and $120,000.

Named after the inventor Nikola Tesla, known for his pioneering research in the field of electricity, the company has big ambitions. Tesla executives talk about building a "new kind of car company" and hope to eventually introduce a series of models, starting at the market's high end and bringing down the price as technology improves.

But the company must first undergo rigorous government safety and environmental tests — a process whose complexity the founders admit they didn't anticipate.

"The car business had more challenges than we expected," Tarpenning said.

Ian Wright, who left Tesla to start Wrightspeed last year, is aiming at the same $3 billion market for high-performance sports cars. The New Zealand-born electrical engineer spent nine months retooling an Ariel Atom race car to run on a lithium-ion battery — a prototype of the car he hopes to eventually sell for about $120,000.

Wright frequently takes prospective investors — and reporters — for a spin in the hills near his Woodside home.

With no doors, roof or windshield, a drive in Wrightspeed's X1 feels like a roller coaster ride and can leave passengers wind-beaten and queasy. It accelerates from zero to 60 mph in 3 seconds, making it one of the world's fastest production cars. Last year, Wright's X1 beat a Porsche and Ferrari in separate races.

"I wouldn't describe myself as a radical environmentalist," said Wright, who is still trying to raise his first round of funding. "I think my customers will buy my cars for performance. The energy efficiency is nice to have, but it's not the reason they will buy the car."