Tesla's all-electric Roadster

MotorAuthority contributing editor Gus Chyba recently visited Tesla's new store in Los Angeles and took the Roadster for a short spin. Here are his thoughts.
My cheeks hurt.The birth of my daughter. My first solo flight in an airplane. Driving a Tesla Roadster. All of these things kept me grinning for hours and hours afterwards. And so now my cheeks hurt.The Tesla Roadster is a complicated and yet simple piece of technology that makes you realize you are touching, or in this case driving, something that's really different from everything that has come before it. Even though it looks like a Lotus Elise, a fantastic little car in its own right, this is something else entirely.The first thing you notice is the shape is slightly different from the Elise. It’s longer by 9in, and a little wider by 3in, but the small increase makes a huge difference on such a diminutive vehicle. It turns the boy-racer looking Elise into something a little more grown up. It has more presence. It just feels more like a ‘real’ car.Your eye is immediately drawn to the glossy carbon-fiber roll hoop cover that looks like it’s been dipped in 20 layers of clear lacquer. It's three dimensional in a way I have never seen; it’s almost hard to focus your eyes on, and kept my attention for longer than it should have.
The rest of the car is equally well detailed. The geek in me got turned on by the charging port, with its line of LEDs that change color as the car charged, and glow white to show you where to put the (huge) plug in a dark garage. There’s talk at Tesla of using removable battery packs in its next vehicle, and of batteries that could charge in as little as 15 minutes. Though 15 minutes seems long compared to a gas fill up, most people would charge their vehicles at home, using a “filling station” only on longer trips.Asked if it was possible to drive to San Francisco, Jeremy, my excellent and knowledgeable host, admitted that it would only be possible if you could find an outlet near the car at an overnight hotel, and if you don’t have a plug where you park at home, it becomes equally problematic.The many electric charging stations dispersed throughout Los Angeles don’t work on this car, since they use the older “induction” style charging circle (like GM’s EV1) whereas the Tesla uses a “conductive” metal to metal plug. There’s no doubt for me after driving this car that an electric motor will be driving the wheels of all future cars, but the question of how to get power to that motor away from home is still not answered.Should you buy this car instead of another $100,000 car? Sure, but it requires forethought. The handling is so good and the power so perfect that it makes most other cars look archaic by comparison. However, taking long trips requires some planning and perhaps the willingness to be towed home on occasion, should your foot become too enthusiastic.So that’s what this car is: precious energy. Because it’s a sports car, the goal isn’t to see how far you can make it go, the goal is to see if you can get the stability control to kick in (which I couldn’t, it just sticks like glue to everything) or to pass that pesky Porsche in the next lane. Squeezing the go pedal in this car is as addicting as coke to an ‘80s lawyer in Florida - you just can’t stop snorting and grinning.