Tesla Roadster: The first cool electric car.

The Tesla Roadster, proving since 2008 that electric cars don’t have to be boring. Built in America, on the chassis of a Lotus Elise, the Tesla Roadster is the first fully electric car you’ll actually want to buy.

The Roadster was the first production automobile to use lithium-ion battery cells and the first production BEV (all-electric) to travel more than 200 miles (320 km) per charge. The world distance record of 501 km (311 mi) for a production electric car on a single charge was set by a Roadster on October 27, 2009, during the Global Green Challenge in outback Australia, in which it averaged a speed of 25 mph (40 km/h).

In March 2010, a Tesla Roadster became the first electric vehicle to win the Monte Carlo Alternative Energy Rally and the first to win any Federation Internationale de l’Automobile-sanctioned championship when a Roadster driven by former Formula One driver Érik Comas beat 96 competitors for range, efficiency and performance in the three-day, nearly 1,000-kilometer (620 mi) challenge. Despite Top Gear’s initial criticism of the bold claims on the Roadster’s efficiency, the Roadster has been a sales success.

Tesla Founder & CEO Elon Musk even sent his own Tesla Roadster to outer space with his Space-X program

Electric cars have been around for almost as long as the motorcar it self, and though manufacturers have time and again tried to implement the technology for mass-production, it never really caught on until the sales success of the hybrid Toyota Prius in the 2000s. But even then, the word “electric” was totally unheard of in the super car world.

Tesla was the first manufacturer to mass produce a fully functional all electric sports car, as all the electric cars up to that point were just boring city-runabouts. And though the Tesla Roadster didn’t have an easy time integrating the electric motors with the demands of a usable daily sports car at first, it opened the floodgates for many manufacturers to produce sporty electric cars and was even instrumental in the revolution of the hyper-hybrids like the Porsche 918 Spyder and the McLaren P1.