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Like many owners I have met (in person, or via the web) I had multiple motives for buying a Tesla Roadster. As a confirmed “car guy” who competes in Sports Car Club of America road racing and has owned many sports cars, I was intrigued by the performance characteristics and styling of the car. As a long-term supporter of environmental causes, I wanted to support Tesla’s efforts to make an electric sports car a reality, and I hoped to help evangelize the energy and environmental benefits of electric cars.

Since taking delivery of Roadster #203 in early March I have used it as my daily driver and spent countless hours answering questions in parking lots, on ferries and outside restaurants. Over time, I’ve found that I could maintain energy consumption around 250 whrs/mile over the mixed city/highway driving that characterizes my daily use. But in early October I got a chance to really burn some electrons, all in the interests of better gaming experiences for the masses.

A team of sound engineers from Microsoft Game Studios (some working on Forza, some on Project Gotham Racing) asked if I was willing to take my Roadster to a track so they could record a variety of sounds. Some time ago they had the opportunity to record Tesla motor noises when a prototype was being run on a dyno at Tesla. But the teams were excited about the prospect of recording other sounds, particularly tire skid and squeal noises, without the interference of loud engine and exhaust noise. Of course I said “yes.”

The teams arranged to use a local motorsports park that was formerly a small airport. We met early (7:30 AM!) so they could mic-up the car. Two hours later, they had three large boom mics “suction-cupped” to the side and rear of the car, plus a mic in the trunk, and two up front over the swaybars and near the front tires, plus one in the cabin interior, the latter mostly to record verbal “clapboards” to identify each segment. A sound engineer with the recording deck rode shotgun and I did the driving.

We did a lot of baseline sound recording of 10 second segments at 10 mph intervals up to 50 mph after which wind noise became an issue. The pavement at the facility included smooth, broken/dirty and very smooth and grippy pavement due to application of VHT compound for drag racing. We were able to get clear recordings of the sound the tires make over these different pavement types at the various speeds. Next was hard braking over these different surfaces from 100 mph. Then the real fun started — hard sweeper turns (generating good tire chirps at the edge of adhesion) then more aggressive skids and slides on the various pavement conditions at the track.

The Roadster was a lot of fun to push hard and to deliberately get out of shape and recover. Handling was fun and predictable. As expected, given the stock suspension settings and tire sizes, the car moderately understeers or “pushes.” I kept adjusting tire pressures, lowering the front pressures and letting the rears stay high as they heated, but could not eliminate the “push.” So, I used the e-brake to initiate “oversteer”spins and give the team the more aggressive tire squeals they were looking for. Like most mid-weight cars, once you get the car to over-rotate, it spins quickly. What a ton of fun.

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The team then asked for “longer” squeal segments. We did tight circles just fast enough to keep the tires howling continuously for 30 seconds or so. The team then asked for very faint continuous squeals that they could use in games and simulators to audibly indicate when the edge of adhesion was approaching. More tight circles, with just a bit less [what — Throttle? No. Accelerator? Awkward. Right foot?] did the trick. The Roadster handled very predictably in these skid pad exercises. It was easy to use the … right foot… to make minor adjustments to the turning radius while keeping a consistent tire squeal. More right foot and the stock front tires – before pushing out of the turn – would eventually yield a loud “shudder” while squealing that the sound team really liked and had not heard before.

Finally, the team asked that I do a series of high speed runs so they could record the sound the car makes as it goes by fast (but with little or no engine/exhaust noise). The team re-mic’d the car, especially in the trunk, to get the engine/transmission noises too and had a mic just 2 feet off track near the end of the available straight. With a fast entry corner on to the straight, I was able to get the Roadster consistently up to 119 in the space available but never quite touched 120. The sound they recorded as we blew by at these speeds was fantastic.

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Twice during the day (both times after several full speed/full acceleration runs in a row) the motor overheated and limited power. But it took only a brief period of cooling to get it back to operating temp again. I was running on “performance” mode all day, and did all the driving with traction control disabled.

The brakes got quite hot after three of the 119 mph runs, which that ended with hard/threshold braking to slow the car before running out of pavement. I generated quite a bit of brake dust, of course, and the unusual tendency of the rears to dust more than the fronts, which seems to be the pattern in normal street driving with my Roadster, balanced out a bit when the brakes were pushed really hard. The pedal got a little soft, but I never experienced any significant brake fade. I DID get some good color in the rotors though!

I reset the “trip” meter before the day began and checked it again when we were done, with just enough charge remaining to get home — 567 whrs per mile! Yikes! But what a fun way to use up electrons.

My wife and I didn’t want a Tesla Roadster, but we bought one and now intend to keep it. This is a story about how and why that happened.

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I’m a Realtor from Greenwich, CT and I’ve been passionately following the development of electric vehicles for over ten years. I voted with my wallet in November of 2007 with a $5,000 deposit on a Tesla Roadster since it was by far the best alternative for me then, and it still is today. My Roadster was delivered on July 27, 2009 after the Plycar driver notified me that he was approaching my house. My wife, Ann, and son, Scott, pictured below were very excited to receive this present from the automotive gods.

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After serving as a U.S. naval officer, including an assignment with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John A. McEwan founded Technology Advancement Group in 1984. TAG began in John’s garage but is now a leading developer of information technology for the U.S. military. (The U.S. Navy is the company’s largest customer.) John, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy with a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, wants to wean the nation from dependence upon foreign oil. He is currently overseeing the “Mount Vernon Project,” a 2.25-acre estate in Fairfax County, Virginia, which aims to generate more energy than it consumes. To read more about John, his Roadster and his projects, visit his personal Web site.

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Michael Marks was interim CEO of Tesla from August 2007 to November 2007. Before that he was CEO of electronics manufacturing services company Flextronics. He sits on the board of directors at several public and private technology companies, and he has been managing partner of Riverwood Capital since March 2007. He took ownership of his Roadster – Founders Series No. 22 – in November 2008.

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Dr. Rob Wilder is Manager of Encinitas, Calif.-based WilderHill Clean Energy Index (ECO), the first Index on Wall Street for renewable energy, better energy efficiency and zero-carbon solutions. He was previously on faculty at U.C. Santa Barbara, and University of Massachusetts; he has been AAAS/EPA Fellow in Environmental Science & Technology, Fulbright Fellow, and a National Academy of Sciences Young Investigator. For a more extensive look at so-called PV+EV technology, check out http://www.wildershares.com

The idea of using solar to power electric cars is tremendously appealing in theory, yet critics insist that it’s a myth or a pipe dream at least a decade away. But it’s here now -– and our Roadster is the proof. Let’s examine how we get 72 miles per day from sunlight, or what I affectionately call 72 MPS, in our solar/electric Tesla.

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Bill Arnett is a software engineer who envies Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers – people who tried to understand a large fraction of all human knowledge. During an attempt to retire and spend more time on hobbies such as photography and astronomy, Bill decided to learn HTML by creating an astronomy site. It became so popular that it generated enough revenue through Google AdSense to pay for his Roadster. Another recent project was an iPhone application that simulates mechanical watches.

Bill, an outdoor enthusiast, appears to be the first person to drive a Roadster in Yosemite National Park. After a May 14 road trip from his home in Silicon Valley in his Roadster, Signature One Hundred No. 55, Bill described his drive through Yosemite as “just about as good as it gets.” Indeed.

When I first heard about Tesla Motors, one of the major factors guiding my decision to purchase a Roadster was the graphic on the Tesla web site showing that it should be possible to get from my home in the Bay Area to Yosemite National Park. In truth, the route winds through the Sierra Nevada foothills and is far longer than the crow flies, getting quite close to the 244 miles per charge estimate from the US Environmental Protection Agency. But taking my Roadster to Yosemite remained an important goal. Here’s how I did it.

Through the wonders of Google maps, I knew it would be 199 miles from my home in Redwood City to Yosemite Village. I’ve never gone that far on a single charge. This would be uphill highway driving almost the entire outbound trip. And I couldn’t figure out how to get access to a publicly available 240V outlet in the entire park.

My plan was to have a charging base at an RV park in Groveland, 40 miles from the park entrance. But Groveland is 150 miles from my home in Redwood City, just south of San Francisco, and I wasn’t entirely confident of getting even that far. So after discovering through an EV enthusiast site that there’s a convenient and publicly available outlet on the outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area, I made a short detour to San Ramon. The San Ramon Valley Conference Center at 3301 Crow Canyon Rd. is home to a Tesla 240V/70A charger. It worked perfectly. Thank you!

From San Ramon to Groveland is only 120 miles – easy. It took 40.26 kWh from Redwood City, or 254 Wh/mile, roughly equivalent to a range of 209 miles. Not bad. Groveland is at about 3,000ft, about 1/2 way to the high point of the road into the Valley.

My next recharge spot was Yosemite Pines RV Resort, 20450 Old Highway 120, Groveland CA 95321. I called ahead to make sure it would be OK. They seemed to be a bit puzzled by a crazy-looking guy with a wooly beard and baseball cap in a sports car small enough to fit inside many of the other vehicles parked there. But they let me give it a go. I happily paid them $20 for their trouble, sat in the shade and read my Amazon Kindle while my car ate electrons at 240V/40A. I also walked a few loops around their nature trail for my daily exercise. After one of the loops, I returned to find that the circuit breaker had tripped. Resetting it worked fine but I lost a bit of time. After that I monitored the breaker more closely.

With my charge level was up to 88%, I figured I’d conservatively have enough for at least 150 miles — enough for the 80-mile round trip to the Yosemite Valley and a 50-mile side trip to Glacier Point. That also gave me enough margin of error for comfort – and for spur-of-the-moment changes while poking around the valley.

Groveland into Yosemite Valley was pure joy. By then it was nearly 6pm, still plenty of light but not much traffic. I wasn’t in a hurry and wanted to drive conservatively to conserve energy — but my Roadster seemed eager for more. “This is what this car was born to do,” I thought. Though it was beginning to get cool, I had the top off; driving thru the pines with the evening light and the increasingly scenic landscape and the wonderful Roadster motor purr was magic.

Even driving slowly, I caught up with other cars. Ordinarily that’s a source of considerable aggravation because passing in the foothills can be difficult in an ordinary car. But the Tesla is almost motorcycle-like in its torque and therefore passing ability. You so much as think of accelerating, and the other car is safely behind in your rearview mirror. The passing ability inspires confidence without nervous anticipation – no worries, just effortlessness.

Then I got to the Yosemite Valley – the pristine home of Half Dome, Bridalveil Falls and other delights. It was almost sensory overload: I loved the feel of the steering wheel in my hands and the cool mountain air blowing past. With the gentle purr of the motor instead of the growl of an internal combustion engine, I delighted in the bird songs and waterfalls amid the sequoias and granite cliffs – and I was consuming all these sights without a drop of stinky gasoline. Life doesn’t get much better than this.

I checked in at the famous Ahwahnee Lodge and asked if they could come up with a way to charge the car. They tried. But the best they could do was 120V. That’s still better than nothing; I got about 7kWh overnight. Someone with better people skills should get a Tesla charger installed there. I would be happy to chip in a significant fraction of the cost.

In the morning, I made my loop to Glacier Point. Going up from the Valley, I couldn’t keep the Roadster well behaved any longer. It was begging to strut its Lotus DNA and Tesla power. The electric powertrain is pure joy on a road like that! No shifting, no dancing on the pedals while trying desperately to keep the engine in its powerband. Read more…

Scott Painter is a serial entrepreneur and car fanatic-in-chief at Zag.com, a technology company that helps buyers get up-front discounted pricing and no-hassle delivery from pre-qualified dealers nationwide. Zag.com aims to “remove the fear factor from the buying process.” Read more…