Is the Tesla Roadster electric car, pictured right, just another computer game fantasy or will it really harness a revolution? Conor Pope reports
Internet legend has it that Bill Gates once compared the computer industry to the car industry. He said, it was reported, that if General Motors had kept up with technology like Microsoft had, "We would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon." In response GM released a terse statement saying: "Yes, but would you really want your car to crash twice a day?"
It's a nice, but totally apocryphal, story. Last month, however we came closer to finding out what might happen if computer geeks did turn their attention to cars when Tesla - a company heavily backed by the multi-millionaire founders of Google and the online payment service PayPal - unveiled the all-electric Roadster at a glitzy affair in Santa Monica.
Designed with the twin aim of dramatically easing the burden cars place on the environment and dramatically reducing America's dependence on foreign oil, the Tesla Roadster looks very impressive. It can do, the manufacturer says, 0-60 in four seconds and produces just a tenth of the pollution of a petrol car. It has a top speed of 130mph, is six times more fuel efficient than the best sports car on the market and its lithium-ion battery gives it a range of 250 miles on a single charge.
With a price tag of €100,000 it isn't cheap but the company hopes that by producing and selling small numbers of the expensive model over the next two years it will be able to subsequently bankroll the production of cheaper, mass-produced electric models.
While it is not the first electric car claiming to herald a new, pollution-free dawn, it might well be the best looking. Many electric cars that have come and gone have been boxy, dinky-like things that appealed, critics say, almost exclusively to sandal-wearing, muesli eating hippies who didn't much care for motors.
The Roadster is different - it looks great. Its carbon fibre body is not unlike the Lotus Elise which is unsurprising as the British company had a major role in designing and developing it.
"Most electric cars were designed for people who didn't even like cars," Tesla's founder and chief executive Martin Eberhard says. "I wanted to build a car that I wanted to drive. And I like fast cars."
PayPal founder and principal investor, Elon Musk has been appointed chairman of Tesla. "We want to do something about global warming," he says. "But you can't achieve your philanthropic objective unless the company works". He is gambling quite heavily that it will work, with hopes that sales of the high-end model will allow the company to sell a four-door sedan with a price of less than $50,000, by 2008.
The car might well deliver on its early promise but history is not on its side. In the mid-1990s General Motors brought out a purpose-built electric car of its own, the EV1. It was the most advanced car of its kind but even with the best nickel metal hydride batteries it could only go a maximum of 150 miles on a single recharge in absolutely ideal conditions.
By any measure it wasn't far enough and that, coupled with the fact that a full charge took eight hours, doomed the EV1 to history's scrap heap.
The Tesla runs for longer and its battery can go from dead to fully charged in 3 1/2 hours. Crucially, it comes with its own portable charging pack so is not limited in range by a need to be close to a home charging station. But is 3 1/2 hours good enough when it only takes three minutes to fill a car with petrol at any one of the hundreds of petrol stations around the country?
It might prove to be the biggest stumbling block for the Roadster. Perhaps reluctance to go electric might stem from a fear that a battery which requires lengthy re-charging limits the supposed freedoms cars grant. It doesn't matter that for most people this freedom never extends far beyond a morning and evening crawl along roads jammed with other freedom lovers in their cars and the occasional jaunt out to a DIY barn in some remote suburban retail park. The perception is that the limited range and lengthy recharge is just too much.
But with oil prices and temperatures rising and hardly likely to fall in the long term, people might be growing more accepting of the need to go electric. The Tesla website is already touting for business when the Roadster will not start shipping to customers until summer 2007.
Irish drivers could buy one in the States and ship it over here although after-sales care would be a problem. "Would you bring it to a mechanic or an electrician?" one wag Motors spoke to asked. To find out we contacted Tesla. Travelling to the US and buying one of the cars next summer to ship home would certainly be possible, a spokesman said, but there would be insurmountable problems with servicing.
While many of the parts could be serviced by a regular mechanic, the car's 400 volts of electricity would need to be handled with extreme caution requiring specialist knowledge and specialist tools. Tesla only employs 80 people and getting people trained in maintenance and establishing chains of supply for parts is a long process, the spokesman said.
The company is only releasing the car in a select few markets - California, Chicago and New York - in the US next year before a wider roll out across America in 2008.
For Irish drivers keen to go electric, the wait might be a little longer and it might be 2010 before the gentle whirr of the Roadster will be heard on roads here. Presuming, that is, the company's electric dreams are still alive.