Revenge of the Electric Car

It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s alive!

My brand new silver all-electric Tesla Roadster sportscar (#23) arrived by truck in Los Angeles yesterday. Shrouded in plastic and tucked into the back of a semi with three other Tesla’s, it waited to be rolled onto the streets of Los Angeles.

My nervousness turned to pure joy as it eased down and I got to drive it into the showroom for its final set of checks. Wow! What a beauty.

It’s been five years since my last silver all electric sports car, a GM EV1, was infamously destroyed. Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of driving a Toyota Rav-4 EV conversion. But this week takes me right back to car heaven. America’s first ground-up design pure electric sportscar since the EV1 arrives again. Hurrah!!

It was a long two years ago that Dean Devlin, our executive producer on “Who Killed the Electric Car”, challenged me to “put your money where your mouth is” and order Tesla’s $100,000 Roadster. All I had seen was the first Tesla prototype that we previewed for the world in our film for three seconds… but that was enough.

We knew who was involved, we knew the legions of people who had fought so hard for electric cars, we knew the technology was possible (hell, we had both driven GM’s EV1 for five years of flawless performance), and now we could see the future. “It’s cheaper then a fully loaded Mercedes” I remember someone with Chanel shades saying. Having never paid more then $20,000 for a car, this was not convincing. What sold me was knowing this was speed and a new era of clean domestically powered American automobiles .

The first 100 orders paid upfront - and thankfully so because the few stocks I sold to buy the car are worth far less today - and then we waited and waited as Tesla sped, lurched, detoured, veered and hurtled through the incredible complex labyrinth of building cars.

And now… the day has come! A day when Detroit’s gas car companies are improbably fighting for their lives. A day when Tesla too has challenges, but a car in-hand.

Final delivery happens at Noon tomorrow in Tesla’s Los Angeles showroom. The keys will likely be handed to me (and EV1 co-veteran Linda Nicholes) by Bob Sexton, the very mechanic who rotated the tires of our EV1s at Saturn Marina del Rey back in 1998.

I am very very lucky!