LOS ANGELES - Tesla Motors' all-electric Roadster sports car will start rolling out to nearly 600 buyers lined up for the $100,000 vehicle by October or November, after a slight delay, the company's chief said on Tuesday. "We will definitely ship in that time frame," CEO and co-founder Martin Eberhard told Reuters at a meeting of the Motor Press Guild, noting that the company had originally expected to begin deliveries during the summer. The shapely two-seaters are being assembled by Lotus Engineering in England, with motors manufactured by Tesla in Taiwan and battery packs made in Thailand with 6,831 individual lithium ion cells from Japan. A late change in the transmission vendor "was a big thing for us to do in the program, very painful, and one of the things that has driven us into a little later this year release of the car," Eberhard said. The Silicon Valley-based Tesla has pre-sold 570 cars to the likes of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for his wife Maria Shriver, and actor George Clooney. The company will make 1,000 2008 model year cars. The Roadster, which has a base price of $98,000, can go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 4 seconds and has a range of more than 200 miles on a single charge on a household plug.
INVESTORS BECKONING Eberhard and co-founder Marc Tarpenning launched Tesla in 2003 with the idea of making a high-performance electric vehicle and then branching out to more affordable cars later on. Since then, Tesla has secured $105 million in funding, with PayPal founder and space industrialist Elon Musk leading the way and venture capital firms joining in recent funding rounds. With delivery of the car approaching, Eberhard said: "We have a lot more interest in investing in this company recently." http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/43572/story.htm
