“In and of itself,” said Elon Musk, “a $100,000 sports car is not going to change the world.”

Mr. Musk is a 37-year-old technology entrepreneur who became extremely wealthy when eBay bought PayPal, which he had co-founded. A lanky South African, he is using that wealth to finance two quixotic efforts. The first is SpaceX, a company he hopes will one day make it possible to colonize Mars. (I kid you not.)

The second is Tesla Motors, which was started in 2003  Mr. Musk became its chief backer and board chairman in early 2004. After raising $150 million and going through four years of technological and internal struggles, the company has begun manufacturing the first-ever all-electric sports car, the Tesla Roadster. Its base price is $109,000. And if Mr. Musk is willing to concede that the Roadster, by itself, isn’t a world-changer, he fervently believes that the technology Tesla has created  technology that gives the car a range of 227 miles per battery charge, and enough acceleration to go from zero to 60 in under 4 seconds  will indeed change the world. The age of the electric car, he is convinced, has dawned.

The Tesla Roadster is a gorgeous sports car. That’s not a surprise: one of Tesla’s goals was to prove that an electric car didn’t have to look stodgy  or resemble something out of “The Jetsons.” Tesla’s other goal, though, was to show that an electric vehicle could provide a driving experience that was a good or better than any finely tuned sports car.

They appear to have succeeded at that as well. “My experience was highly positive,” said Don Sherman, the technical editor at Automobile magazine who test-drove it last December. “It was a very exciting, very interesting piece of work that I found quite appealing.” Though I’m no auto expert, I’d have to agree. I took the wheel for an hour last week and came away exhilarated by how quickly it accelerated, and how beautifully it handled. For the first time in my life, I had car lust.