Tesla Roadster Reviews

MOST of the dozen Australian owners of the world's fastest production electric car use them for daily chores. So says Tesla Motors Australia boss Jay McCormack. But with acceleration to 100km/h as quick as a V8 Supercar and a body and suspension based on the quick-handling Lotus Elise, it's no wonder some owners are taking them out for track days. And that is where I had my second test drive in the limited edition Roadster, at Queensland Raceway.VALUEMcCormack says they have sold 12 since January and expect to sell 30 by the time production winds up. They arrive at $160,000 but with various duties and taxes they cost $206,188, despite the fact that electric vehicles attract no stamp duty in Australia. Add in the on-road costs and it is one expensive daily runabout. But if you consider the acceleration, Lotus pedigree and intrinsic value of being an early adopter, it could start to make sense for some rich eccentrics.If you are one of the 15 per cent who opt for the Sport variant you can add an $30,000. For that you get an extra 50Nm of torque (400Nm), adjustable Bilstein rear suspension, forged alloy wheels, a "more capable" AC motor and a "slightly different software program" for the cooling process. A full charge will only cost $8 and if you drive in the "range" mode you get 394km of range. There is also a "standard" mode and a "performance" mode with range determined by your driving style.The resale value is very good, according to McCormack."I cant see many being re-sold, but some have sold for more than they cost new. I would expect most customers to hang on to them. If you look at the beginning of the modern electric car, this is history."TECHNOLOGYThis is actually the fourth iteration of Roadster. Like computer software program names, it started with the 1.0, then 1.5, 2.0 and now 2.5. Only the 2.5 has been sold here, although I last drove a privately owned 2.0 at QR in 2009.The 2.5 has the same AC motor and gearbox but slightly different software, 30Nm more torque and an extra 3kW hours of storage.At the heart of the Tesla is a battery of small lithium-ion liquid-cooled cells powering a four-pole AC induction motor which provides the sort of performance power and torque figures you would expect from a sportscar; certainly more than the petrol-powered Elise on which it is based.Tesla claims it will hit highway speeds in less than four seconds which is the same as a V8 Supercar.You can charge it at home, but it will take about 15 hours on 10 amps. At the track, we plugged into a 32 amp charger which takes about six hours to fully charge.Tesla claims 394km range in "range" mode, but after some furious morning laps by potential customers, at 266km it required lunchtime charging.DESIGNIt's based on the stylish Elise and adds tonnes of carbon fibre including the detachable roof and has a space-age interior. There is little room for any luggage and the interior is fairly Spartan.SAFETYIt comes with two airbags, four-wheel ventilated disc brakes, stability and traction control, but no crash test results. There are two Yokohama tyre options - Neova and extra-grippy A048 which we drove on the track.DRIVINGThe Roadster saves some of its battery life by not having power steering which makes it heavy to steer around pit lane, despite the light weight of the vehicle. Just after the pit lane 40km/h speed zone ends, I flatten the throttle and experience an uncanny linear acceleration feeling like a rocket. But it takes longer to go from 100km/h to our top speed down the main straight of about 170-180km/h.It's a mid-engined, rear-wheel drive car, but it doesn't handle like one. Turning into the first few corners, the steering goes light and the front end pushes with understeer. With the sport option Yokohama tyres fitted, there is plenty of lateral grip for good mid-corner speed, but it runs wide coming out of the corner because it is difficult to invoke oversteer. That is because acceleration is linear and not peaky, so it is difficult to break traction or suddenly shift the balance to the rear with power.The bumpy Queensland Raceway circuit provokes plenty of kickback through the steering wheel and with no power assistance the driver fights the wheel and has to hang on tight. Ride is also fairly stiff and it would probably be fairly uncomfortable on normal roads with that hard sports seat.The last time I drove the Roadster, I set a lap record for an electric car on the Queensland Raceway truncated "sportsman" circuit of 1:13. This time it was dry and, although we didn't have the lap timer running, it would have been much faster with the grippy Yokohama tyres.Last time we experienced brake fade and an overheating motor, but despite higher track temperatures, there were no such problems this time, although the brake pedal is soft and stopping power requires pre-empting the usual braking markers.VERDICTThis is a piece of history that you can drive on a daily basis and take to a track day for some fun with a relatively clear environmental conscience. Left-hand-drive Roadsters have ceased production and there are only about 100 right-hand drives to come before production ceases. With so few available, it might even make sense to an investor or collector to grab one and put it in storage.TESLA ROADSTER 2.5Body: 2-door roadsterMotor: 3-phase 4-pole AC induction motor, 185kW/350-400NmTransmission: single-speed gearbox, rear-wheel driveBattery: 53kWh lithium-ion cellsRange: 394km maximum in "range" modeDimensions: 3946mm (L), 11873mm (W), 1127mm (H), 2352 (WB) Kerb weight: 1235kg

"FUEL, sir?" Not unless you have a plug, a 30m lead and eight hours to spare.  Force of habit has taken me into a petrol station to pause, stretch the legs and put the roof up. It's a blistering Sydney day and top-down this Tesla Roadster is too hot for comfort.But of course I could have pulled in anywhere, because this Roadster, one of just a handful in Australia, is an electric sportscar. It no more drinks petrol when it's parched than you or me. If its batteries needed replenishing, then there would be no point stopping here.Besides, the Roadster is charged to the brim. Awaiting my arrival, it was connected to a special box on the wall of Tesla's nascent Sydney HQ by a cable as thick as a baby's arm. Most owners are expected to invest in one of these fast chargers, which lower the time on life-support to 3 1/2 hours. They're not cheap at $4500, but then you're not buying a hatchback.Plugged into the mains with a three-pin, you'll need to leave it overnight to juice it up for its 360km range. The rewards for your patience are running costs well below anything with an engine. At $10 a fill, the Roadster does the equivalent of about 2 litres per 100km. No sportscar - or hybrid, for that matter - can come close.Nothing comes out of the tailpipe either, because there isn't one.  Previously, my exposure to electric vehicles has been limited to a few kilometres in city runabouts, a couple of laps in experimental prototypes, and fun fair dodgems.This is the first time I've been free to explore the limits of one without a minder looking over my shoulder.  And its limits are one of the first things on my mind. The car's theoretical 360km range constantly changes in line with my right foot. Hit the throttle hard for a minute or two and the range display drops precipitously. If I switch it into Sport mode, it drops even more.My intended route covers about 200km, so it should be doable. But getting it wrong would be an embarrassing, not to say time-wasting, disaster. I realise I'm already suffering from range concern and I fear it's a precursor to full-blown range anxiety.Carmakers vary in their assessment of this ailment. Depending on the degree of their commitment to the battery car, it's either a debilitating disease that can leave you totally reliant on public transport, or it's a completely irrational fear and you just need to get a grip.Reason prevails and I press on. Putting the roof up - a manual procedure on a par with pitching a swag - has made the heat more bearable and served as a reminder of how the Roadster started life.DESIGNIt's based on a Lotus Elise, the tiny British sportscar, but with the aluminium chassis widened a bit and all the panels, in carbon fibre, bespoke to the Tesla. The Californians then fit 6831 lithium-ion batteries, an electric motor, a single-speed gearbox and a box of electronic gubbins behind the cabin. Tesla says just 7 per cent of the final car is actually a Lotus Elise.From the driver's seat it feels like more, because the cabin is extremely similar. The main difference is a small centre console where the gearstick would normally be, which houses a touchscreen to access the Roadster's brain.The thick sills that make getting in and out of an Elise so difficult are the same, as are the dash and the steering wheel. There's the same dreadful Alpine audio and satnav system used by Lotus, and the same airconditioning system with two settings: loud and louder.TECHNOLOGYPerhaps it's 7 per cent by weight, because the batteries and other stuff behind me weigh 450kg. All told, two-thirds of the Roadster's 1450kg sit over the rear axle. And that's before you've squeezed luggage into the 170-litre boot, which sits right in the tail.Uneven weight distribution is obviously not ideal and initially I'm acutely aware of it. But it's not unique in the car world. Floor the throttle and the Tesla's nose bobs up, a bit like a Porsche 911's. Also like a 911, the rear tyres have no problem getting traction down and have a mountain of grip.DRIVINGOnce you get used to it, the car feels tied down and through corners it stays remarkably flat. The suspension has to be firm to get that result, but that's what you expect anyway in a sportscar.  Usually, the price would be an unbearable ride quality, but it isn't. There's less jolting than in an Elise.Which isn't to say it's a serene place to be. Wind and road noise thunder through an Elise, with its lack of insulation and roll-your-own roof, and it's no different here. There's less engine noise to smoother the racket - and pedestrians might be oblivious - but inside the motor is louder than expected.When we're all driving electric cars because V8s have been banned, the Tesla might be remembered as one of the songbirds of the flock.  While we can still enjoy the glorious tunes that petrol can make, though, it's never going to make the charts. It sounds like a tram that's entered Formula One.The question of how much sound plays in the magic of a sportscar comes to the fore with the Tesla. Because it doesn't lack handling and it certainly doesn't lack acceleration. The first time I experienced an electric car at maximum volts will stay with me for some time.The Sport version, driven here, goes like a cat that's stuck its claws in the mains. It will hit 100km/h in under 4 seconds. That's a supercar, whatever it's got in the tank. Even if it doesn't have tank. Uphill, when the instantaneous torque comes into its own, it's fantastic. Downhill you can exploit the dramatic engine braking.With only a single gear, revs and speed move in tandem and one dial serves to measure both. The Roadster maxes out at 14,000 revs, which is F1-like, and that equates to just over 200km/h. Which isn't enough for F1, but just about enough for Sydney.The range proves sufficient as well, although there's not a lot to spare when I get back. The car's electronics step in to curb lead-foot tendencies as the range dwindles, or to prevent the batteries overheating.VERDICTThe Roadster is an extremely unusual sportscar and the company thinks as many as 40 Australians a year will be curious enough to buy one.  It has many of the drawbacks of the donor Lotus but, for the moment at least, offers something unique in the way it delivers supercar performance. Something with eco-credentials.And I find consolation in the paradox of this. Nobody, after all, needs a sportscar. It would be greener not to buy one at all. Tesla sees itself as allied to the environmental movement. I prefer to think of it as working undercover for the other side.

If you like petrol – and I love it – this feels like a betrayal. I’m in a screaming hot sports car that uses no petrol at all, and it might just be the fastest-accelerating car I’ve ever driven.The Tesla Roadster 2.5, a fully-electric two-seater built in California by way of Lotus in the UK, uses a monster stack of lithium-ion batteries to deliver the sort of straight-line performance usually associated with twelve Italian cylinders (or six turbocharged German ones).A bigger shock, so to speak, comes when you lift off the accelerator.  Remember what happened when you backed off the trigger on your little Scalectrix cars? They stopped.Well, so does the Tesla. That mass of cells coupled to a one-speed gearbox acts as a massive (and power-regenerating) decelerationunit.Which is almost a pity, since the example I’m driving is equipped with a cute combination of AP Racing and Brembo braking hardware. Tooling along in standard Sydney traffic, there’s barely need to use any of it.As well, there is also the faintest scent of hard-spinning alternating-current motor. It isn’t unpleasant, although it is more intrusive than anything you’ll experience in a comparatively-priced sportster.Other oddities include the very nature of that fearsome forward propulsion.  A lot happens in a typical high-performance car under maximum acceleration. Hundreds of intricate reciprocating, revolving and repeating parts work together to convert a sequence of controlled explosions into thrust. It’s beautiful and dramatic, if inefficient from a green perspective.The Tesla just has … power. There’s more drama in a carpet-cleaning infomercial. If you can pick out the AC motor’s high-pitched hum above the tyre noise (which is noticeable here, but usually overwhelmed by the engine in a conventional car) it sounds sort of like a turbo without an engine attached.In fact, the whole series of events leading up to any accelerative bursts is extraordinarily fussless. Turn the conventional key in the conventional column lock. Wait, out of habit, for the engine noise you won’t hear. Press the button marked D on the centre console. Apply foot to right pedal. Then sweep past almost any car on the road, at least up to the highway speed limit, which the Tesla hits in under four seconds.A handy g-meter located on the console notes the forces involved. We recorded a quick reading of 0.7 from acceleration alone. Putting aside any technical explanations, this basically gives driver and passenger an instant Botox effect. Ka-pow! No lines or wrinkles as your whole face is suddenly hauled backwards. (Braking causes the opposite, of course. An instant Ernest Borgnine effect.)Corners aren’t such an easy win. The Tesla is based on Lotus’s rail-handling Elise – although with development now shares only a claimed seven per cent of components – so the basics are all abundantly sound. But the combined mid-mounted cell pack and transmission weighs 450kg, meaning that this is one very light car (largely built from carbon fibre) with a substantially heavy and dense centre section.It’s fine around town, if you don’t mind the lack of power steering (I don’t, despite it requiring more effort than in the featherweight Elise). Just a guess at this point, but a track test might turn up some quirks. After all, 450kg is hard to hide, as Al Gore’s tailor can tell you.Which brings us to the types of buyers the Tesla might attract. At a base price of $206,188, this isn’t for the dirt and dreadlocks brigade. Nor, considering the Lotus-inherited entry and egress challenges – youthful flexibility is required – will it suit oldsters or the chunky. But if you’re a cashed-up 30-something with both the hots for Gaia and some surviving strands of testosterone, this might be the guilt-free performance car for you.One additional advantage: it’s a convertible, so the WRXs and V8s you leave behind can hear you laughing as you go. For petrol-drenched carbon addicts like me, that will be a very cruel sound indeed.

The world's fastest electric car, the Tesla Roadster, was put through its paces this week at Queensland Raceway where the V8 Supercars usually roar.While there was no roar from the quiet electric car, there was still plenty of V8-style acceleration with the tiny vehicle whipping up to 100km/h in an impressive 4.2 seconds on a wet track with two people on board. Down the back straight of the circuit, the car wound out to an indicated 110mph (177km/h), just short of its electronically limited top speed of 200km/h.While there have been plug-in electric cars before and new models are about to hit the Australian market, these are plodding and quirky looking, are slow to recharge and have limited range.This is where the Tesla is different. It looks and goes like a Ferrari, recharges in 3.5 hours and has a range of about 390km, depending on how hard it is driven.When we hopped into the car at the track the computer screen display on the left side of the steering wheel said the effective range was 285km. After less than a dozen laps and some hard 0-100km/h tests, the screen displayed the message: ‘Motor getting hot. Power reduced.’ Range was then reduced to about 100km. By this stage the four-wheel ventilated disc brakes were also getting fairly hot and ineffective while the road tyres were losing traction on the wet track with standing water in some corners.We still managed to set a time on the truncated ‘sportsman’ circuit of 1:13.57. That's not bad considering race cars do the same lap in about 1:06. It's also a track record for an electric car that will probably stand for some years. Our times were gradually getting worse due to the fading brakes, reduced motor power and my passenger; a nervous Eric ‘the human handbrake’ Erickson. He represents Internode, the internet service provider which imported the vehicle for display purposes. Erickson said the car was not designed as a track car, but an ‘everyday sports car’."It is designed to give the other manufacturers a bit of a fright that while they are still thinking about their electric cars, this one is already available and turning some heads," he said.It certainly is a head turner, looking as futuristic as the De Lorean in Back to the Future. Although it doesn't have a flux capacitor for time travel, it is named after a unit of magnetic flux density which is named after Serbian physicist and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla who also invented the radio, AC motor, and Tesla coil.The Tesla Roadster costs about $160,000 and is only available in left-hand drive so it is not registerable on Australia's roads, however a right-hand version will be built in England from February. It is currently only sold in the US, England, Germany and France.Tesla is also working on a four-door sedan Model S which is expected to hit the market in 2012. It will cost half as much as the Roadster with almost 500km range, a 45-minute recharge time and a 0-100km/h time of 5.6 seconds.The Roadster is a product of Tesla Motors in California's Silicon Valley, but was designed by English sports car company Lotus and is assembled in Hethel, England, using many of the Lotus Elise parts and a lightweight carbon fibre body.Its remarkable acceleration comes from a mixture of immediate maximum torque, light weight and a good power-to-weight ratio. The Roadster weighs just 1.2 tonne, which is about half a tonne less than a 3.5-litre V6 Commodore Omega, but has 185kW of power which is 10kW more and 380Nm of torque which is an extra 55Nm over the Commodore.Launching off the starting line is like stepping on to an escalator. With maximum torque from 0-5500rpm there is instant cheek-ripping acceleration. However, despite being made by Lotus, this is not a hard-edged sports car and by no means a track car.The suspension is fairly plush with a bit of nose dive under hard braking. It understeers a little into corners which is surprising given its mid-mounted motor and batteries and light front end.Punching the throttle to shift the weight and steering emphasis to the tail is hampered by the soft intervention of the stability control system and the human handbrake's refusal to allow me to switch it off.It uses a single-speed transmission with reversed polarity for reverse which has a limited speed.Turn the ignition on and you can hear the whirring sound of the large fans under the bonnet which are part of the airconditioning for the cabin and to keep the batteries cool. Then there is a chiming sound to say that the motor is switched on and ready to go. Move away and the whirring increases, but not much louder than normal tyre noise.The brakes feature a regenerative system to recover power and return it to the battery. It also acts as an ‘engine braking’ system when you take your foot off the accelerator. This braking effect is much more noticeable at slow speeds than high speeds where the vehicle coasts along and slows gradually.Steering is very heavy, the turning circle is not good and rear visible is poor, so parking is tricky. However, the steering feels precise at high speeds around the "paper-clip" Queensland Raceway circuit, although there is a fair bit of kickback over the notorious bumps. The small steering wheel is set low and is non-adjustable.While the outside is well made and the sports seats are leather, the spartan interior trim is dominated by hard plastic and cheap-looking instruments. Getting in and out is as difficult as in a Lotus Elise, but once in the cockpit, it feels comfortable with generous legroom and headroom.The rag top has to be removed by hand and stored in the surprisingly big boot. Even with the top removed, there is little wind noise, so the lack of aural feedback is quite a surprise at high speed.An interesting feature is a valet mode that restricts speed, acceleration and range while a valet is parking your car _ so no Ferris Bueller's Day Off, either.Is this the green future of motoring? Not until the mains electricity is also green, but at least it should reduce CO2 emissions in cities and quieten traffic noise.SnapshotTesla Roadster PRICE: about $200,000 on the roadMOTOR: 3-phase electricPOWER: 185kW and 14,000rpm limitTORQUE: 380Nm from 0-5500rpmTRANSMISSION: single speed, rear-wheel driveBRAKES: ventilated discs with ABS, stability control and regenerative power DIMENSIONS (mm): 3946 (l), 1873 (w), 1127 (h), 2352 (wheelbase) TRACK (mm): 1464/1499 KERB WEIGHT: 1220kgPERFORMANCE: 0-100km/h in 3.9 seconds (claimed), 4.2 seconds (tested) TOP SPEED: 200km/h (limited)RANGE: 390kmRECHARGE: 3.5 hoursBATTERY REPLACEMENT: about $16,000CO2 EMISSIONS: 0g/kmFUEL ECONOMY: 0L/100kmMake One Degree of difference today by calculating your carbon footprint and finding out what you can do to reduce it.