Tesla says that 520 S Model all electric sedans have been reserved by customers in first week since it was announced. Each customer must pay a $5,000 reservation fee, which is refundable if they choose not to buy the car. The base price for the Model S, which will be available starting in 2010, is $49,900 after a federal tax credit of $7,500. A limited editon of the Model S is available for a $40,000 reservation fee.
The Model S is the second car unveiled by Tesla after the sportier Roadster, and it’s half the price. But it’s no slouch on performance. The car will do 0-60 in 5.6 seconds (the Roadster is 3.9 seconds) and has an electronically limited top speed of 130 mph. The car should go up to 300 miles between charges. Best of all, I believe I may actually fit in the Model S. The Roadster isn’t fully compatible with people my size.
If you want one, you can reserve it here. You should get it by late 2011.
Tesla says they delivered 104 Roadsters in March and about 320 all time. The company has raised $186 million in capital to date, and has applied for $350 million in federal loans.
Here is the Model S and Roadster side by side:
You could totally score some road noggin in that car.
$2.6M in
feesdonationsSeats 7 people? How the hell does it seat 7 people? Are there three rows? Is it 2/3/2 or 3/4?
Any one know the answer?
Also, why is safety not mentioned on site? Have they not yet tested safety?
Supposedly there are 2 additional drop down seats for children. For some reason though, there are no pictures on their site showing this.
Must be baby-buckets in the truck.
Where will Snow White fit?
“and here are places for three more people to sit! most other car companies call it a bonnet.. but not us!”
actually safety is mentioned on the site, check around. it was def there.
not bad!
2015 all cars will be electric or hybrids.
ElectricLocator.com – plug yourself
Hmm, I don’t get this hype about this car. Yes it looks nice but it’s very cheap. So if people go crazy and reserve their special Lamborghini it makes sense. But with a 50k car? Am I missing something here?
Supply. They don’t have a huge production line so they can’t just churn them out. If they can only manage a couple of hundred cars per month then if you want to be one of the first to have one you’ll have to sign up.
…and image. $50k is not that much if you want to drive an image badge. How much do people pay for the raising or lowering of their car/truck plus the rims, tires, custom paint, etc? I always laughed at the people who bashed the ROI on the hybrids when the owner was getting as much ROI as the person with the spinners.
your ROI measurements in this case are completely subjective.
Yeah, big ups for spinners!
love this great news for auto industry
More news like this one every day!!!
Hopefully they do not screw it up on the manufacturing process. Why are they trying to have their own independent manufacturing plant when they should be outsourcing it to an existing plant (NUMI?) when the auto industries existing manufacturing runs are shrinking? If they do make it then go on their own. Basically shut down an existing line for a month to retool, run, and reset without the HUGE overhead. Hopefully their egos are not getting in the way of financial logic.
I second Stefan..i was thinking the same..what’s the big deal? is it the eco behind the car that hypes it up or what. It does look nice but not waiting til 2011 nice.
Are you completely dense? it’s a fully lithium battery powered car with more than 2 seats and less than 100K like the Roadster. It’s not an Indian Tata car. It’s not a wanker looking Prius. It’s a hot looking sports sedan that claims great performance while saving the environment.
What’s there not to get?
Nurse Techcrunch gets it, which is rare amongst TC readers.
2011 – things will change by then. Also, what’s the deal with service for these? Do they have any service stations set up?
how fast is it without the governor
also, mad props to the early adopters for breaking in the tech so those who prefer fully proven machines can have electric cars someday
Enter the only worthy company part of the government stimulus!
Why the hell can’t we just give them $50 Billion instead of all the incompetent banks?
I so wish there was a people’s vote on the stimulus! If nothing else so I could see Bank of America go down in flames!
Couldn’t agree more. With the crap surrounding the current automakers in this country I’m surprised to see how little they’ve been funded.
the banks? have you looked at the fine print of the stimulus? even if you haven’t, the money going to GM and Chrysler is more of an apt comparison than the banks. After all, the banks will eventually pay the Tarp back, GM is forever doomed.
Yeah – let the banks collapse- who needs them anyway? I totally agree we should go back to the lima bean currency, stashing them in our mattress, and paying 100% lima beans for everything like our house, lithium battery powered cars. Who needs credit when you can grow lima beans.
Shut your ignorant mouth Daniel Larsson!
Dang – [some of] the readers here on Techcrunch are a bunch of ignorant morons.
I love the lima bean idea.. i mean, paper money is only money because u let it be that way.
plus we’ll all be growing even more lima beans and that helps the earth beacause we’ll all have more plants! hey! we can counter act all the tree killing in the rainforests! ha! like that’ll happen.
I do love the idea man, i really do.
The roadster looks pretty cool.
http://www.wannadevelop.com
Wow! that’s too big money.
I love this car.
I would like to make the reservation right away. But this reservation won’t be valid for Europe, from what I understand. At least not now. Hmmpf…
model s hasnt been approved for the top tier tax break yet. that and you cant say it starts at 49k after a tax break, thats just bad journalism
Thats marketing – not journalism.
The real question is, did you reserve one Mike?
i want to test drive one first if possible.
PONZI SCHEME!
I still prefer the look of the Fisker Karma despite the price difference. I like how it doesn’t come with a 2 speed transmission, which was the great delayer of the Roadster at the insistence of Elon. What a bad bad idea that was, Elon, but when you’re ego is in the way of actually getting a car out the door, bad things happen. It’s too bad that Daryl was the only one who fell on his sword, when you should have considered doing the very same.
I wish GM and other big car manufactures would get their head out of their a@#$…
and either buy companies like Tesla or start imitating them!
There’s a documentry on how GM built an Eco car a long time ago, but scrapped it as they thought there wasn’t a market for it.
Try they were bought out by special interest groups and the oil industry and instructed not to produce it.
Agreed
whokilledtheelectriccar.com
they were instructed by “special interest groups” to destroy every one of them. the only ppl that have them now are the 2 inventors. one each.
THANK YOU AGAIN US GOVERNMENT!!!
BUY them????? Crap this is a commie site!!!! No one here loves independent companies.
$2.6 mil…that should keep the wolf away from the door! Props to Tesla for combining style, performance, and innovation; flying in the face of the rest of the dysfunctional auto industry.
Ive test driven the roadster, nice car but very small and for its price in the current situation (gas being cheap) there are better options…
For families and based on the 0-100 time, this sedan looks like a real winner though. Shame its still a few years away
Very nice. It seems like an infinitely better deal than the Roadster, but I guess sometimes you really need to do 0-60 in 3.9 seconds.
this is the saviour of tesla. the car is much better looking than the roadster, taking it’s lines from aston martin, maserati and jaguar – and it’s affordable. i hope it sells by the bucketload
Who designs for these guys? It is absolutely marvelous!
Mike, when are you getting your’s?
Here’s a cool video revealing the Tesla Sedan: http://www.yout...h?v=HvzOdYVw6Pw
It is a fantastic looking car. On that alone it deserves to do well, but that it shows a path that more drivers are going to have to follow too means it doubly deserves to succeed.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
wow
It’s very well showing the performance of the car on paper, but lets get real, when these cars actually gets released will they still live up to its own expectations or will this just be an other nose-dive?
This is what I am thinking. Many of the above commentators allege that this company will save the auto industry, let’s not put all of our eggs into one basket…
do they post maintenance and service numbers anywhere? Will it cost me 50K now and another 50k keeping it running for 3 years. I’m pretty sure my local service guy can’t fix a spaceship.
According to their numbers it will actually be very cheep to maintain since their isn’t much that can go wrong in an electric motor.
Again their marketing is claiming the price will be more aligned with a car in the mid-$30’s due to it not needing gas or as much service as your regular car.
I love this car, and the sad fact is that it won’t be available in Australia for at least 2 years after its North American launch.
This car looks to be really cool and has a great price tag to it. Any chance of this car making it up north to Canada without me having to import it by myself?
Ok nevermind. I just read the details.
Be careful when thinking you will get that credit. If the credit is the same hybrid credit you get for buying a Toyota or Lexus Hybrid and you make over a certain amount of money the IRS won’t give you the credit. If it is some other credit then you will probably get it.
My wife and I purchased an RX400h and were expecting the $3000.00 credit, but when our combined salaries went over a certain level that year, well, xnay on the editcray.
No credit fo you!
Wow, hope to have that kind of thing someday.
We need an SUV
Great looking car. Bad timing. I hope they hang in there until the recovery. I think its pretty amazing what they’ve accomplished thus far with 186 Million. How much money have we given Detriot?
Maybe Cisco will buy them.
Viva la Tesla. Love the fact they had to “electronically limit top speed”. Even if only getting started, great for them pushing the boundaries and getting us closer to this as a standard. Electric vs big-oil, as AC vs DC (Tesla vs Edison).
Does everyone here realize that these cars are Coal-powered? Electric power is not green today. Nothing comes out of your Tesla exhaust pipe – but it’s coming out of a really huge exhaust pipe connected to your electric grid, spewing CO2 from coal.
If you crash them there are no parts and you have to send them back to the factory. There are no places to charge them today, other than your house where you can’t just plug them into a wall.
Other than that, they’re pretty cool.
Coal is a good point, but even using coal, the energy is cleaner.
And once we have electric cars, we can swap out for any other power source as needed (solar, nuclear, etc.)
Hard to swap out gas.
LOL, coal is significantly dirtier than gasoline. Gasoline was a clean burning fuel when it was invented…
Then we should build a dam to have green power. Wait the environmentalist need to save a unknown snail… never mind. Bring the coal.
look man, if you look into some of the worlds worst river disasters.. you will see that AT LEAST 80% of these disasters were DRASTICALLY made worse because of the dam that had been built on that river. They’ll break when there’s already flooding and send a large sum of water in an instant to nearby cities, instead of rising slowly. Dams do NOT work in the long haul, and can cause more harm than good. just like gas and coal have both done.
And btw people.. there’s NO SUCH THING as Clean Coal, despite what you may have seen advertised and supported by Barack.
Yep, and we have plenty of coal in the US. We’re the frickin middle east of coal. forget global warming, this may save us from more wars.
couldn’t agree more. Clearly we need to start building more power plants in the country–it won’t be long till the amount of electricity needed to power up a Tesla is the gas equivalent of $5 a gallon
Even using coal to generate the electricity an electric car is over 80% efficient compared to 15% for a gasoline car,so it is has the carbon equivelent of over 110mpg.
not to mention the fact that as more green power is generated the electric auto fleet gets greener.
THIS!!!!!! (what Terry said above). A Tesla burning electrons is exponentially more beneficial than current model. I have two family members who have served a total of FOUR deployments to Iraq. I pray this car (or one like it) really works because if it does then the Persian Gulf is out of business in one generation. I learned about OPEC as a small child and would love for my grandkids to read about it one day the way my children learn about the Soviet Union: from history books.
Nice, electric cars that actually look appealing. Very nice aesthetics and great job to the design team!
Very Nice.
Agree with everyone who stated that the Gov’t should give some serious $$$ to this project.
Or – should Tesla go public? I’d buy shares in the company if that meant more capital to raise production levels and speed to market. But if they went public maybe they would not have the leeway to make decisions and maneuvers as quickly as a private company. At any rate – great products and design coming out of Tesla. Something that people are excited and buzzed about – keep it up!!
BE AWARE OF PAKEARN[.]COM & RELATED WEBSITES. THEY ARE FRAUD & SCAM
These companies are only making fool to innocent Pakistanis and unemployed people. Their core business is to get the money from their pockets without any benefit for others.
When you visit their office, they would say that you will be trained and a sum of Rs. 500 (or more) would be required from you. DON’T PAY THEM. The training they offer is nothing. You can even learn it by yourself in only a week.
They are dealing in Google Adsense and Adsense never works in Pakistan in a proper way. Don’t loose your money and inform your friends about PAK EARN and its fraud campaign.
Just think for a while, why would they require 3000 or 5000 people in Karachi only????
Because the more people they fool, the more money they would get. They are just filling their pockets. If you would multiply 500 with for example, 1000 people, then guess what? The total amount they would get is 500,000 (Rs. Five Lac). And you are not getting anything, not from the training and not from spending money.
SO BE AWARE FROM PAK EARN AND RELATED WEBSITES
You are always welcome to contact me at, mutedcute@gmail.com
Much more affordable to the rest of the population without sacrificing performance. The design is also kick a$$ in my opinion.
We have three choices now – Fisker-Karma, Aptera and the Tesla – if we want new technology cars. Agree about outsourcing. Could have been a win-win for both sides. Americans are large people, so the car that carries two – 6′ tall 150 pound+ people and a dog will win. Just drove from SF to SOCAl – about 500 miles – 300 miles just isn’t quite enough distance for that trip, so my Audi A4 wagon at 30 mpg on the hwy still wins. Tesla needs to stand on its own financially.
Here’s to digging Silicon Valley picking up Detroit’s slack!
http://digg.com...pany_Gets_2_6_M
The car looks nice and they’re definitely media savy.
I still question the long term viability of a car that requires overnight charging…..if you run out of power at an inconveient time it is going to suck hard.
Electric cars in some countries (such as New Zealand) would work well as we have a reasonable number of renewal power providers. But it seems in the US you are basically running a coal powered car if you plug it in?
Still at least they are trying.
Mike, did you order one?
not yet. i want to test drive one first. or at least sit in one.
300 MILES/CHARGE?!
WOW! what about when you have to drive longer distances? I happen to drive alot.. and stopping every 300 miles to charge my car for 45 minutes is inconvienient to say the least.
It’s a start, I’ll give it that.
Standard pack is 160/Miles. The other packs cost more and Tesla expects people will rent them. So, does that mean this thing now costs $60k.
Standard charge time from a household 220V outlet is a little under four hours.
Any information on whether this is AWD, or if that option is available?
Jonathan; I am going to pick on you but I think a lot of people’s reactions shows how spoiled and fickle we are. To steal a line, America’s happy-motoring fiesta has got to end: it’s bankrupting us, destroying the environment, and requires us to defend our economy and way of life with military force 8000 miles from home.
What I really want to know is does this thing really WORK? If it does then it’s just the thing to get our economy off the deck and stop us borrowing money from the Chinese to buy poison from Arabia (many of whom hate our guts) and put us back into creating real wealth and helping ourselves and the rest of the world.
a pity that it will not be available for a long time.
and unfortunate that a company which stems from Silicon Valley has not been able to do some really rapid development.
sexy products like this one are great and inspiring, and I want one, too (actually: both), but we need a new approach NOW.
a recent report on NPR about kids somewhere back East converting a Ford Focus with off the shelf parts to be 100% electric, at low cost – THAT was inspiring.
it is ready now, and Ford could build it this summer in mass production – if they wanted to.
Parts, service, dealer network, trained repairmen (electricians?)…anyone remember DeLorean? Nice styling and exciting green passions is not enough to sustain long term viability, particularly at that price. Built in California, much of it designed in Michigan. Enough collectors of isoteric cars to buy out a year or two of production, then…? BTW, according to WSJ, 50% of world’s electricity comes from coal. Prior to the recent economic hiccup, China was putting up about 1 coal fired plant every 10 days. We could clean up our act in the US and carbon emissions get worse. Anyone asked a Toyota dealer how the Prius is selling with gas at $2/gallon? And this sells for$20K more. Granted, gas could go up to $4 or more but the economy can’t stomach it and then who could afford it?
Sorry, business case closed.
Am I the only one to whom $50k is not a reasonable price??? I love what Tesla is doing and absolutely want the “s” but unfortunately it’s not an option. What I (and I’m sure many others) would like to see is Tesla come out with a “peoples car.” That is one that could be sold for under $20k and still have the integrity and engineering Tesla seems to be putting into it’s current models…Hurry!!! I’m not getting any younger!…
I love electric cars- but I have problems with the Tesla. The first is obviously price- for electric cars to make a positive effect on our economy, environment, or lives, they must be affordable by all. Secondly, the Tesla uses li-ion batteries (which also drives up the cost). I believe we should be pressuring the government to force chevron to license the NiMH batteries to battery and auto manufacturers. For anyone who agrees with me, or wants to learn more, I suggest the book Two Cents per Mile by Nevres Cefo ( http://www.twocentspermile.com )