Thursday, May 6, 2010

Road test of the Tesla Roadster Sport - fast, expensive but good

The German car magazine "Auto Motor und Sport" did one of the first comprehensive road tests of the Tesla Roadster Sport. I was expecting that they would trash it, but actually they were much more positive than what I expected.
Here's what they measured:
0-100 km/h: 4.3 sec
0-180 km/h: 16.3 s
Max speed: 200 km/h
100-0 km/h: 37/35 m
Max range: 328 km
Min range: 200 km
Energy consumption: 20 kWh/100 km, 4 Euros per 100 km. For 4 Euros you could roughly buy 3 liters of gasoline, so no Diesel is going to beat this economy.
So what do these results tell us? The car is fast and can compete with many similarly priced sports cars such as a Maserati or an Aston V8 Vantage if it's about these measures.
Price wise the car is expensive, roughly 130'000 Euros. And regardless of all the new technology it's an Elise at the end, but with much more weight (1'267 kg versus roughly 900 kg). The handling of course suffers due to this and obviously the steering got quite heavy. On the other side this car offers more power and especially torque than any Elise or Exige.
My take? An expensive Elise, but a "cheap" electrical super car. Nothing for me, as I still like good engine sound, something electrical cars will never be able to provide except through the stereo.

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