Tesla Roadster at the Ocsars
Oscars, celebrities, glamor, Al Gore wins for An Inconvenient Truth and this is the photo Yahoo! news chooses to use to show how the Tesla Roadster met Hollywood at the 79th Academy Awards? C'mon, where's the sexy, the cool? This is a shot of the Roadster in a parking lot. I'm going to have to say we've seen better (to see AutoblogGreen's own shots from the unveiling last summer, click here).
Actually, that's a shot from before the ceremony. Hollywood.com says that 30 Roadster prototypes were involved in shuttling celebs around (all those ceremonies and parties to get to), so you'd think pictures would be floating around all over the place. Not yet, anyway. (UPDATE: Actually, this number is hogwash, as Tesla's Siry tells us below)
Yahoo! does tell us something I hadn't heard before, which is that 330 celebrities, including George Clooney, have signed up to buy the electric, according to Tesla Motors vice president Darryl Siry. (UPDATE: This is wrong, too. Man, what a night it must have been at the Awards)
Gallery: Tesla Roadster
[Source: Yahoo! News, Hollywood.com]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tony Belding 4:29PM (2/26/2007)
I am often startled by the difficulty reporters have getting simple facts straight. No, there were not 30 Tesla Roadsters at the award ceremony. That would be a neat trick considering there are only two such cars in the USA currently, and only about a dozen have been manufactured thus far. If I had to take a guess at what they really meant, I'd assume that Global Green brought 30 cars of all types, of which 1 or maybe 2 were Teslas.
I believe 330 is the number of Tesla pre-orders. As far as I know, nobody is keeping count of how many buyers are celebrities -- unless they consider that buying a Tesla is enough to make you a celebrity!
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siry 5:49PM (2/26/2007)
I'll second Tony's comment, since I was the guy that was misquoted. To see the viral propagation of one misquote is really fascinating. It shows the power of Reuters. I spoke with Mary Milliken from Reuters to correct the fact that I had said that there were about 330 orders, not celebrity orders. She said she'd issue a correction but anyone who picked it up won't bother to correct it. Also - I saw the reference to 30 roadsters doing drop offs. Not true - there was not a single one! I'll tell the complete story in a blog on the tesla site in the near future.
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Sebastian Blanco 7:52PM (2/26/2007)
No, Siry, the right move here is to give exclusive access to ABG. Not your own blog :)
And I knew that number sounded high, but I haven't seen a list of who has "purchased" (read: ordered) a Roadster recently. As for 30 Roadsters, well, if I can't trust Hollywood.com, who can I trust?
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LotusEliseBlog 9:02AM (2/27/2007)
Not to try and throw dirt towards the Tesla, but why isn't the cramped interior and pain of getting in & out mentioned in each of it's reviews? I don't know for certain that the Tesla suffers from this but seeing as how the door sills & interior are borderline identical to those of the Lotus Elise I would expect to see the same bitching and moaning that is brought up any time an Elise/Exige is mentioned.
Again, not trying to dirty the Tesla name/image as I think it's a hell of a car. It just seems odd that the car this is based on can't escape those common feelings yet this one manages to avoid it altogether.
And yes, owning one will at least make you feel like a celebrity. If it's anything like an Elise then you better get used to seeing camera phones sticking out of windows every time you hit the road.
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Lithous 10:39AM (2/27/2007)
"Again, not trying to dirty the Tesla name/image as I think it's a hell of a car. It just seems odd that the car this is based on can't escape those common feelings yet this one manages to avoid it altogether."
This is how life works. Tesla is new and many people want to like them. Whereas if GM had 30 Tahoe hybrids delivering people Farrago would be looking in the engine bay to make sure it is a hybrid. Ripping off the engine cover with hybrid printed across it just see that the (transmission based) full mode hybrid "really isn't a hybrid". Kinda like declaring that any mid/rear engined car is powered by magic after lifting up the "hood" and seeing no engine. That is how people do things.
There will be little to no flaws with the Tesla until they screw up a few dozen times. What am I talking about, Toyota has screwed up millions of times and they are still America's sweetheart. It is how it is.
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rcousine 4:31PM (2/27/2007)
I suspect the reason that nobody is complaining about the Tesla's interior space or ingress/egress issues is because they're reasonable for a sports car.
What would be unacceptable on a minivan is a reasonable compromise (favouring structure strength and low weight, probably) on a sports car.
I suppose there are Elise reviews out there that complain about the door sills, but it's rarely more than a passing reference, since the reviewers are usually too entranced with the performance aspects.
The Tesla (and they're pretty up front about this) was built as a sports car first because the expectations of a sports car are narrower and more easily achievable for a small carmaker trying to enter the market. The margins are also better.
Conversely, nobody worries much about the terrible lap times most minivans turn in.
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Tony Belding 6:47PM (2/27/2007)
Just for extra clarification, the door sill of the Tesla's frame was modified from the Elise design. If you look at photos of the frame you can see where it was cut down. Rahul Nair -- an Elise owner -- mentioned this in his blog after he visited the Tesla HQ, and he described ingress and egress as being "a lot easier" in the Tesla. His verdict: "The Tesla beats the Elise hands down when it comes to general livability."
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DaveDen 4:55PM (3/10/2007)
I've been in and out of both an Elise and a Tesla Roadster. There's a world of difference between the two, as far as ingress/egress effort is concerned. The Elise is a challenge to get into, and a PIA to get out of. The Tesla Roadster is decidedly easier, both ways. To be honest, I don't remember the Tesla ingress/egress as being an issue, it was that easy and uneventful. Getting in and out of the Elise left a permanent, not so positive impression in my mind.
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