It’s About Daggone Time

We put a man on the moon in 1969. That’s almost 40 years ago. But for some reason, until just a year or two ago, we’ve been driving the same, tired, expensive-to-maintain and even-more-expensive-than-ever-to-fuel car paradigm for, oh, 80 years. I was reading a comment on Scott Adams’ blog in which the commenter referred to a company called Tesla Motors. I believe I will be paying attention to what comes out of that company.

I was excited when the hybrid vehicles started coming out, and I was all set to save up for a hybrid Honda Accord, until I found out that they were only making a hybrid V6 with all the bells and whistles. Hardly makes it worth the gas savings. My other problem with hybrids was that they looked ugly (see: Toyota Prius), but auto manufacturers seem to be doing better at that (Ford Escape, Toyota Camry, Honda Civic, to name a few).

Enter Tesla Motors. Based out of Silicon Valley, they’re producing entirely electric vehicles, and the first one, the Tesla Roadster, looks HOTTT (*drool*). Reading on Wikipedia further, I found out they are developing a competitor for the BMW 5 series, which will cost somewhere in the 50-70K range. With the profits from that, they plan on developing a more affordable car. That’s where I start paying attention intently.

If they can develop a completely electric car that will get me to, say, Ft. Lauderdale in the same time I can get using a gas-fueled car, and if that car costs around 30K, I’ll think about buying it for a little while. But what makes me happier is once this company does it, another company will do it, costs will come down, and eventually the big dogs will start doing it. Of course we’ll never get rid of gas vehicles because petroleum is too important to the world’s economy, but at least I’ll be able to find an electric car that I like.

-j

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