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Tesla's Roadster Is

Sex on Wheels

We've been writing about the Tesla Roadster for more than a year, and Tesla Motors finally gave us the chance to drive one. For two hours. Around town. With a PR flack riding shotgun. Despite the short leash, we pushed the electric sports car hard enough to know it's quick, nimble and fun — but not as exciting as we'd hoped.

Don't get us wrong: The Roadster isn't just an excellent EV, it's an excellent car. The power is impressive, the fit and finish are top-notch, we love the instant power, and that candy-colored carbon shell is sexy as hell. Most impressive, it's a true sports car that just about anyone can hop into and drive fast.

And that's exactly the problem. The Roadster is so easy to drive it's almost, well, boring.

Still, you can't help but grin when you're behind the car's tiny Momo steering wheel. Aside from drawing more looks than a chrome Lamborghini (though that's probably a San Francisco thing), the Roadster's acceleration is addicting. It isn't the horsepower that's so impressive — though 248 horsepower in a 2,700-pound car is nothing to sneeze at — it's the torque. Stomp on the skinny aluminum accelerator and all 276 foot-pounds of it is right there, instantly. That's why we love electric motors, and it's the reason the Roadster does zero to 60 in a Porsche-worthy 3.9 seconds.

The power is linear, coming on evenly and strongly, and we imagine it does so all the way to the car's claimed top speed of 125 mph. We didn't push it that high with the publicist in the passenger seat, so we'll have to take Tesla's word for it.

Handling is neutral with a slight tendency toward understeer, which is odd given 65 percent of the car's weight is over the back wheels. Try as we might, we couldn't get the back end to break loose or oversteer noticeably around corners — but, as we said, we had a babysitter within freakout range, so we weren't driving the way we might if, say, you were next to us.



The Roadster's ride is firm but not stiff, even over pockmarked city streets, and the Yokohama Advan tires are stickier than a movie-theater floor. The manual steering makes tooling around a parking lot quite a chore, but the wheel lightens up at speed. All in all, the Roadster handles a lot like the kartish Lotus Elise it is (loosely) based on, and the guys at Top Gear found it can match the pace of the mighty Porsche 911 GT3 around their test track.

However, the driving dynamics are unlike those of a conventional sports car. In a normal sports car, you can slip around a turn faster by lifting off the throttle. This sudden drop in power transfers weight to the front tires, taking traction away away from the rear end. Oversteer, as it's called, is a good thing if you don't panic; you can essentially make the vehicle pivot around the front tires, allowing you to corner faster and tighter.

We couldn't do this in the Tesla. The torquey electric motor, which does such a nice job of saving your brakes by generating electricity as you let off the go-pedal, doesn't cut the power from the rear wheels quickly enough. Granted, you probably shouldn't be inducing oversteer on public roads, and there isn't yet an electric-car racing league in which to flog a Roadster. But Tesla owners with aspirations of tearing up the twisties will have to readjust more than just their refueling habits: They're going to have to learn to drive differently.

And the rest of us aren't far behind. The inexorable wave of electric cars that's set to drench the world's roads and garages and tracks will require a new performance-driving paradigm. Instructors at Skip Barber will have to modify their spiels; racers will have to retrain their neural pathways. Though we didn't have the chance to really figure the car out, we got the best results by tapping the brakes at a turn's apex. It's a little hamfisted and jerky, but we just weren't going fast enough to try to break the rear end's death-grip on the pavement with throttle. And, like we said, there was that flack to worry about.

The Brembo brakes were up to the task, but we weren't thrilled with their initial bite. It isn't a big issue in day-to-day driving because the re-gen system is so generous with the engine braking, but we wonder what it will mean under hard driving. Back off on the throttle, and the 185 kilowatt motor becomes a dynamo, generating energy instead of using it, and returning it to the 992-pound, 53-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack located right behind the seats. It takes a little getting used to keep from nauseating your passenger in traffic.

The fit and finish are as impressive as the technology underpinning the car. The carbon fiber is gorgeous, the paint shimmers, the panel gaps are even and everything works exactly as it should. The heated leather seats are firm and supportive, but getting into them requires the flexibility of a gymnast, because the door sills are as wide as the car is low. (It is, however, a lot easier than getting in the Roadster's British cousin, the Elise.) Once you're buckled up, the car is comfortable, though the footwells are about the size of a shoebox.

The interior is a bit Spartan, and the creature comforts seem like afterthoughts. Our Tesla rep countered these observations by repeating "It's a sports car" so many times we thought she might have a nervous tick. Yeah, well, Ferraris are sports cars too, but every modern model has power mirrors — something the Roadster inexcusably lacks. The carbon-fiber center console is a beautiful piece of automotive sculpture, but it felt flimsy. The climate control knobs were awkward, and the JVC navi screen was so small it's sure to cause accidents when lost eco-motorists lean in close to scrutinize the Liliputian map to find nearby charging stations. And the computer that lets you switch performance levels and access the system diagnostics is located exactly where the coin tray should go. If we owned a Roadster, it'd be about a week before we jammed a quarter through the tiny LCD screen by mistake.

But we could live with all that. What really bugged us about the Roadster is its silence. Except for a little tire noise, you don't hear anything but the faint whir of the motor. Tesla spokeswoman Rachel Konrad hailed it as a selling point, but the roar of a high-performance engine and the sound of the exhaust is as much a part of the sports car experience as acceleration and handling.

We'd probably get over that eventually, but the silence also makes the Roadster easy to overlook in traffic, as the woman yakking on her cellphone while making an illegal left turn discovered when she almost plowed into us. It doesn't help that the Roadster is just 44.35 inches tall. Small and silent isn't the best combination for urban traffic. Perhaps Brabus was on to something when it developed that "space sound generator" that mimics the sound of a V-8 engine.

Photos: Jim Merithew/wired.com

Check out our glorious full-color gallery, Tesla's Roadster Is Sex on Wheels.