Schwarzenegger seizes Tesla Motors plant for California

Tag : Model Battery

"To see this company build a plant in New Mexico drove meabsolutely insane," Schwarzenegger said, quoted by Reuters. "Myadministration ... does not like to lose."
California managed to secure Tesla's new plant by offering a taxexemption on manufacturing equipment to zero-emissions vehiclebuilders. Tesla is presently headquartered in California, and hasits design team there, but much of the assembly on the presentRoadster is done in the UK by Lotus (its body is basically anElise).
The Roadster was long held up by technical difficulties, and whileit finally went into production in March it will be produced for anindefinite period with what Tesla describes as an "intermediatesolution" transmission. The company says that this will be durableand reliable, but won't deliver the Roadster's one trulysupercar-like capability - the much-touted 0-60 mph in four secondsacceleration.
Instead, production Roadster transmissions will be good for sixtymph in just under six seconds - a bit more like $40k hot hatchbackacceleration than true supercar poke. (The Roadster has neverpretended to be a supercar - or even a hot hatch - in terms of topspeed, maxing out at a very ordinary 125 mph. But acceleration is alot more relevant than top end to normal road drivers.)
Tesla promises that once it has a proper full-poke transmissionsorted out and able to fulfil the promised spec, it will retrofitthis to all the early Roadsters for no extra charge. Most Roadsterbuyers probably aren't buying for performance anyway, and thatwould presumably be doubly true for the new mass-market design.With fuel prices seeming to shift from ballistic (what goes up mustcome down) to astronomical (staying sky high forever) thetremendous user economy of electric cars - in the UK, currentlyequivalent to slashing your petrol bill by 90 per cent - is lookingmore and more impressive.
The new Tesla Model S (previously aka "WhiteStar") is intended tohave broader appeal than the Roadster, being substantially lowerpriced and featuring five seats rather than two. Both it and theRoadster will still have the main, crippling downside ofall-electric cars - a long recharge time once the battery pack isflat, making such vehicles unsuitable for long journeys or othersustained use. The Roadster is said by its makers to run flat afterjust 165 miles of "aggressive highway driving", and hours ofrecharging is pretty much a deal-breaker for ordinary mortals -common in the UK, at least - who must park their cars on the streetovernight.
That said, Tesla has previously mentioned plans to offerrange-extended variants fitted with supplementary petrol generatorsthat might stretch out a battery charge as far as 400 miles (unlikea normal hybrid such as the Prius, these cars would then flake out;the generator can't usefully propel the car on its own, it justekes out battery life). These plans evidently won't disqualifyTesla from getting the California tax break, though it refersspecifically to zero-emission vehicles.
Company founder and main money man Elon Musk - also of PayPal andSpaceX commercial spaceflight fame - is now firmly in control atTesla, following boardroom battles with other early players lastyear. Apart from tussles with fellow Tesla founders, Musk is alsoembroiled in a legal scrap with bodywork designer Henrik Fisker,who he says pirated tech secrets from Tesla and stiffed the companywith a deliberately bad body design for the new mass-appeal carsnow to be made in California.
The new models will now use bodywork with major creative input fromMusk himself, and are expected to start rolling off the NorthernCalifornia line - location as yet unspecified - in "late 2010".®