TESLA all electric for towing...

[dfkrug]

That said... the South Bay/Silicon Valley seems to be loaded with them... especially Los Gatos... grabed a burger
on a weekday for lunch and every time I looked up another Tesla was driving by... of course in Los Gatos you will
find a fair number of high end cars... even a Ferrari Dealer if memory serves.

Ferrari of LG is long gone (fired by the manufacturer), but the biz still sells luxo cars.

I test drove a Tesla Roadster a few years ago, but they want too much for it. It is essentially a Lotus Elise with
a battery and motor, but costs 4x as much! They also offered a pre-purchased 1st battery replacement
for an additional $12K.

I drove the green one for a few hours, without the dealer.

 

[ultrarunner]

Would have enjoyed the opportunity to put a Tesla through the paces for an extended test drive...

Never knew exactly what happened to Ferrari of Los Gatos... thanks for bringing me up to speed.

 

[dfkrug]

Would have enjoyed the opportunity to put a Tesla through the paces
for an extended test drive...

Never knew exactly what happened to Ferrari of Los Gatos... thanks for bringing me up to speed.

Ferrari USA fired most (all?) of their independent dealers, and went to a much smaller # of FUSA-owned
dealers in the US. The Bay Area has only one now, in Mill Valley, AFAIK.

Here is is photo of the Tesla motor used in the roadster. That car had very good acceleration, but repeated hard
use requires a cool-down period, or the battery will overheat. So, not a very good car for Track Days.

This was back when final assembly of the Roadsters was done in Palo Alto, at their first dealership on El Camino.

HQ later moved to a vacant Agilent bldg in PA, and manufacturing of the Model S went to the huge vacant
NUMMI bldg in Fremont, as you know.

 

[ultrarunner]

They sure do seem to sell well around these parts and I'm happy for the thousands of jobs Tesla provides...

Tesla took a location that GM and Toyota abandoned and made it viable... at least for now.

I mentioned Ferrari because the small town of Los Gatos had a Ferrari Dealership and is the place where I stopped for lunch and noticed just one Tesla after another drive by... plus every other high end car I could think of...

Aston Martin Dealer is alive and well in Los Gatos too...

 

[crazyal]

Musk said his goal was to make the battery pack out of readily available cells. The idea was that designing and building special cells for the battery packs would drive up costs with little to no benefit. The good thing about an electric car is that there's not much to it. A battery pack, a speed control system can can charge the battery when braking, and the drive motors. Gas engines use to be pretty simple as well. I can remember a mid 70s Chevy truck I owned, one wire for the coil's power and one wire for the alternator. Even then they were choked down with smog control devices. You would open the hood and climb inside to work on it.

 

[s219]

Here's a short video of the Model S assembly at the Fremont CA Tesla Plant.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/8_lfxPI5ObM?rel=0

The last time I visited the plant it was called NUMMI and spent the day watching Mom's Corolla being built to drive off... with much of the assembly being done the old fashioned assembly line method...

Great video! I could watch stuff like that all day long. BMW has some real interesting assembly videos too -- they are heavy on the automation like Tesla appears to be.

 

[dfkrug]

There may be a ton of technology in a Ferrari piston, but all that tech is just as
likely to make it less reliable.

When I rebuilt my Ferrari engine back in the 90s, I had to replace most of the pistons, and they were
made by Mahle of Germany. Nothing special about them, except the top 2 rings were only 1mm thick,
so the engine could rev higher. Mahle also makes pistons for some of my Huskies and Stihls, among
many other car models.

Yeah, the car ('83 308QV) was not built very well, but that flat-plane V8 sounded sweet.

As for the Tesla Model S, I have never had one apart or owned one, so I have little to say on their
engineering. 2 friends of mine have one, and they love the car, however.

 

[dfkrug]

Aston Martin Dealer is alive and well in Los Gatos too...

The biz that was Ferrari of LG sells Aston, Lotus, and Bentley. Oh, and Bugatti, too. No Telsas
there, but there now seems to be SEVEN Telsa dealerships in the Bay Area.

 

[ultrarunner]

The Bay Area has really embraced our local and only West Coast auto plant.

Don't know about elsewhere... here seeing Teslas is an everyday occurrence and I wish them continued success.

 

[sld]

I looked at one in a shopping mall in Mission Viejo. Pretty creative marketing.

It was actually a store that sells them too.