Car Throttle

Last week, we were out of town and had the opportunity to stop in at Tesla Silicon Valley in Menlo Park, California. This dealer is where a lot of Tesla sales take place, in the heart of California's tech industry and Tesla's backyard. It just so happened that the updated Roadster 2.5 was recently announced and on display at the dealer. The cars on display had already been sold, and there was a customer in the dealer in the process of a purchase. The particular model we saw on display was a Roadster Sport 2.5 in Simply Orange. It looked extremely good with the carbon fiber accents, and we loved the orange color. The updates for the 2.5 versus the 2.0 are subtle, but improve the look.

Small volume companies are hard to come by in the automotive industry. Globalization and consolidation due to economies of scale have snuffed out most of the smaller guys. Tesla, on the other hand, is a startup company that aims to defy that. So far, Tesla has already cooperated with Daimler, inking a deal with the company that resulted in a 10% stake. As part of that deal, Tesla provided electric powertrains for the smart lineup. Another partnership could be in the works now, announced today by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He said that Tesla Motors will partner with Toyota to build electric cars in California. As most following the company know, Tesla has been working to find a California manufacturing facility. They were rumored to have selected a

At the Geneva International Motor Show, Tesla debuted a special TAG Heuer Roadster. The car has special markings and a its "Foucault Field Gray" color, along with an interior that has a specially-designed console to fit in with a special (you guessed it) Tag Heuer watch. We know, the stuff dreams are made of. Apparently the car was coordinated around the Swiss watchmaker's 150th anniversary, and to celebrate that, the TAG Heuer Tesla Roadster is embarking on a 12,000-mile world tour called the "Odyssey of Pioneers." Leonardo DiCaprio, one of the first Roadster owners and an "official TAG Heuer Ambassador" began the tour along with Tesla's CEO Elon Musk and TAG Heuer's CEO Jean-Christophe Babin. Check out the dates for the tour below, beginning in Monaco this month and

In January, it was discovered in a SEC filing for an IPO that Tesla would stop selling the Roadster, due to tooling changes at the Lotus plant in Hethel, England where it is built. The Roadster's production was contracted out to Lotus, and it shares some components with the Elise. The announcement was unplanned, and would have left Tesla with no vehicles to sell until the Model S comes into production. That is a dangerous position to be in, but it looks like Tesla has worked something out. The latest update broke in Tesla's March newsletter, where Tesla says that, "responding to customer demand" agreements with suppliers have been negotiated, increasing Roadster production by 40% in order to extend sales into 2012. With those agreements in place,

In what Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk is calling "the worst day in Tesla history", three Tesla executives were killed today in a small plane crash in Palo Alto, California. The names of the three victims are unclear, but the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the plane was owned by Doug Bourn, a senior electrical engineer for Tesla Motors. As the names have not been confirmed, it is unclear if he was onboard. They were only identified as high-ranking executives of Tesla Motors, along with two other employees. UPDATE: Tesla VP of Communications Ricardo Reyes & VP Diarmuid O'Connel were not on board the flight. The plane is a twin-engined Cessna 110, manufactured in 1976 and registered to Air Unique, Incorporated in Santa Clara, California. The cause