By this time, of course, the Tesla has left it for dead.
Tesla Motors Inc. has had a short and tortured history, which I will not recapitulate here. Suffice to say the Silicon Valley electric car company, founded in 2003, has always seemed whipsawed between its own worthy ambitions and its nutty, headstrong arrogance. It turns out that creating a car company is vastly harder and more expensive than PayPal co-founder and jillionaire Elon Musk -- now Tesla's chief executive -- ever thought. Only in the last few months have the first Roadsters trickled out to customers.
The company's survival depends on securing additional millions in private capital and millions more in federal loan guarantees so it can build a new factory for its proposed S-series sedan, to be unveiled next month. We'll see.
But what cannot be in doubt now is that the Tesla Roadster is, within very strict limits, a superb piece of machinery: stiff, well sorted, highly focused, dead-sexy and eerily quick.
Zero-to-60 mph acceleration is less than 4 seconds, which is Ferrari quick. Around a tight, technical racetrack, the Telsa will beat the pants off your garden-variety supercar.
And it's tough, too. I only had the car for 24 hours but I caned it like the Taliban caned Gillette salesmen and it never even blinked.
During the Tesla's long march to the market, there was debate in the blogosphere about the range the car could get on its 53 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack. Well, it turns out those discussions were academic, since the car is so small and brutal that you will give out long before the batteries do. Officially, you can go about 220 miles in mixed, moderate driving. Meet me in Paso Robles, at the chiropractor's office.
The metabolism of the Telsa is very much like that of the Lotus Elise upon which it is based: lightweight (2,750 pounds), agile, uncompromised and indecently fun to whip around corners. The unassisted steering is race-car quick and precise, though the wheel loads up and fights back in high-G cornering.
The brake pedal feel is firm and progressive, betraying little of the system's inherit artificiality. The "brakes" are actually a synthetic combination of calipers and the electric motor's regenerative braking effect.
Is the Tesla worth $109,000? Well, if you've got it, it is, and apparently Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney, Matt Damon, David Letterman and Arnold Schwarzenegger all do. But I have my reservations.
