Charging-station network built along 101 ELECTRIC VEHICLES

This is a Tesla electric car using one of the charging stations along a "charging corridor" between San Francisco and Los Angeles that Rabobank unveiled Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2009. This is a Tesla electric car using one of the charging stations along a "charging corridor" between San Francisco and Los Angeles that Rabobank unveiled Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2009. Photo: SolarCity Photo: SolarCity Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Charging-station network built along 101 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Say you own a Tesla, and you're in the mood to take your sleek electric sports car for a spin down the coast to Los Angeles.

Assuming you started in San Francisco with a fully charged battery, you'd get as far as San Luis Obispo, or maybe Pismo Beach. Then the battery would die. Like all electric cars, Tesla's $109,000 roadster is limited by its range - about 250 miles.

So a solar power company and a Dutch bank have teamed up to build five recharging stations for Teslas along Highway 101 between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. One of the stations gets some of its power from a solar array.

Pit stops will take 30 to 45 minutes, far longer than the usual visit to a gas station. But the recharging stations, most of them located in the parking lots of Rabobank branches, are situated near stores, cafes and restaurants, where drivers can pass the time.

"You can stop, get some lunch while you're charging," said Lyndon Rive, chief executive officer of SolarCity, which created the stations. "It would be great to have a society where, if you have an electric car, you know you can go someplace and get a charge, whether it's the bank, the coffee shop, the grocery store."

Drivers won't have to pay for the juice.

Rabobank, based in the Netherlands, will cover the cost of the electricity, which isn't expected to be very high. Fully charging a Tesla costs about $4. Most drivers using the stations are expected to top off their batteries rather than recharge from scratch, which takes more than three hours. And Tesla Motors, based in San Carlos, has sold just 700 roadsters so far.

"I do not believe we're going to have a hundred cars lined up tomorrow - there's not that many of these cars on the road yet," said Marco Krapels, an executive vice president with Rabobank. "We're trying to provide some momentum to the renewable energy movement."

The recharging "corridor" cost about $80,000 to create, with the money coming from a grant Tesla received from the California Air Resources Board.

The electric vehicle recharging stations - in Salinas, Atascadero, San Luis Obispo, Santa Maria and Goleta - draw their power from the state's electrical grid. But one of them, at Rabobank's Santa Maria branch, connects to a photovoltaic solar power array, and the others may eventually get the same treatment. Rive calls it "PV meets EV."

"We're combining clean, renewable solar power with all-electric transportation, allowing drivers to travel through California with zero emissions," he said. All the stations are up and running except the one in Goleta, which will open in October.

Recharging electric vehicles might seem a stretch for SolarCity, which installs and leases solar power systems to homes, businesses and government agencies. But the company, based in Foster City, recently bought an electric-vehicle-recharging business and has already installed more than 100 solar home recharging stations for Tesla owners.

There's a family tie between the companies as well. Rive and his brother Peter, SolarCity's chief operating officer, are cousins of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk serves as SolarCity's chairman.

For the moment at least, only Teslas can use the stations. But that could change. SolarCity plans to add another, more standardized plug to each of the stations in the future. The budding electric-car industry has discussed adopting a standardized plug to make sure that recharging stations can serve multiple brands.

"There's a little bit of a tower-of-Babel thing going on," said Tom Dowling, who runs a Web site called EV Charger News that lists recharging stations. "I'm hopeful that in the next year or so this will all get straightened out."