What if an Electric Car could go 500 miles and charge in one hour?

[billc]

Wait, ask how much the Tesla roadster costs.

 

[Steve]

for a car thats comparable in speed, handling and style to a lotus, porsche or ferrari... It's right in the ballpark.Bill, whats the real problem?

 

[Sukerkin]

I don't know a great deal about the electrics so please bear with me on this.

How fast are they? How quickly do they do the 1/4 mile? 0-60?

I know it mey be sophomoric but I love the way my mustang performs. If they can produce an electric the performs as well or better than I would be all over it.

Mark

:grins: It's not hard to outperform a Mustang, Mark ... or indeed almost any American car .

There's the GT40 ... oops, mostly designed in Britain and Italy ... or the Mosler ... I watched TVR's eating this for breakfast at Donnington ... or ... what? There's some uber-l33t 'super-car' that held the speed record for about a minute but I'd have to use the Net to recall what it was.

EDIT: Here is one of my favourite clips about performance cars:

[yt]XGATSb54YEQ[/yt]

 

[billc]

Well, left leaning, main stream media outlet, ABC news did a report on both Fisker and Tesla, this is what they mentioned about Tesla...

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/car-company-us-loan-builds-cars-finland/story?id=14770875#.Ts3TE2BO9FA

Tesla's SEC filings reveal the start-up has lost money every quarter. And while its federal funding is intended to help it mass produce a new $57,400 Model S sedan, the company has no experience in a project so vast.

And there is this little bit of info. on Tesla...

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2793811/posts

The most troubling transaction: a $465 million loan to California’s Tesla Motors. Tesla received a loan rate of 1.6% from DOE to manufacture an all-electric car that will sell for nearly $50,000. It will not exactly be the people’s car. Tesla also builds luxury sports cars that retail for $103,000 to $128,000.
Tesla also is no simple new age car company. It is owned and financed by big donors to the Democratic Party and to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Tesla’s principal owner is Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal. He has an estimated personal wealth of $672 million. His firm received venture capital from the The Westly Group, Daimler Chrysler, and from Abu Dhabi investors. The firm has partnerships with luxury sports car manufacturer Lotus and with Mercedes-Benz.
The secret to access to the DOE money is The Westly Group, run by California Democratic Party stalwart and big Obama campaign bundler Steve Westly. The former eBay executive wasn’t merely a prodigious fundraiser for Obama, raising $500,000 for his presidential campaign. He also served as the president’s California campaign co-chairman. Another Obama $500,000 bundler was Solyndra investor George Kaiser and his foundation.
Westly got statewide attention in 2006 when he spent $35 million of his own money to run an ugly and largely negative race against California state Treasurer Phil Angelides for governor.
Westly is a personal friend of President Obama, and since the election has visited the White House for meetings and social parties. He privately dined with the president in February with a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires. It was called the “trillion-dollar dinner.”

Westly’s Washington political connections to the White House have made him a “pied piper” of DOE money for start-ups. DOE records show that Westly’s venture capital firm has reaped at least $500 million in DOE loans for his companies, wowing Silicon Valley’s VC community.
Westly also sat on Tesla’s board of directors early in the car company’s life.
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk also has been a generous donor to the Democratic National Committee, contributing more than $120,000 over three different election cycles and $292,250 to political campaigns, overwhelmingly to Democrats.
Financial analyst Brian Krasting has called the DOE loan program “free money” for all electric car manufacturers at taxpayer expense. Others have called the Tesla deal a form of “corporate welfare” for the president’s friends. There have been complaints from alternative energy companies that the ATVM loans were awarded because of political connections.
DOE defends the Tesla loan, telling PJMedia it was sound and neutrally approved by its financial analysts. However, the DOE spokesman also acknowledged not knowing of the company’s plan for a $200 million NASDAQ IPO when it awarded the firm the loan. Nor did the spokesman say DOE knew Toyota was to become its partner in the plant when DOE issued the loan.