Tesla's Model S invades dreams and soon showrooms

The Tesla Model S beckons to me from a poster tacked to the wall behind my computer terminal.

It's a sleek silver with custom rims that look like blades of a jet turbine. I can imagine popping the door, climbing in after work and blasting quietly onto the freeway listening to AC/DC's Highway to Hell. 

That's the thought anyway.

Daydream nation

Many motorheads are likely tuning to a similar daydream. Cool car, custom and the latest technology. Great name too. Tesla, after Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest electrical engineers of the modern era, responsible for developing the alternating current electrical supply system. He even demonstrated wireless energy transfer back in 1891 and inspired a pretty decent rock and roll band.

Suffice to say the dude is cool. And so is the car named for him. Although this vehicle's arrival has more to do with Tesla Motors Inc. Chairman Elon Musk, another bigwig in the innovation realm. In addition to his co-founding of Tesla, Musk also has been instrumental of the commercialization of space travel via his efforts on SpaceX and its Dragon spacecraft, which returned successfully from a trip to the International Space Station.

Summer is the S season

The Model S is due in showrooms June 22, but the first cars will likely go to reservation holders as the manufacturer slowly rolls out each completed vehicle from assembly lines at the Fremont, Calif. plant. In an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Musk writes that reservations for the Model S topped 10,000 soon after first quarter 2012.

"We plan to continue making customer deliveries on a slow, methodical ramp, and remain confident in our target of 5,000 vehicle deliveries by year end," he says.

Anticipation is building. "Eagerly waiting for delivery in LA 'Lower Alabama,' writes jlswit on a post by George Blankenship, Tesla vice president of sales, on the company website. There are many more such fan responses.

Range is key

The car sounds like a major step ahead of the competition. In addition to Chevy's Volt and Nissan's Leaf, Ford's come out with an electric Focus, trumpeting "You'll never need a drop of gas or an oil change." Mitsubishi has its odd looking MiEV, which according to the manufacturer is the "greenest vehicle of 2012." And there are the independents: Coda, Fisker and others.

The base price of the Model S is $49,900. But the statistic that catches my eye is the range. Darren Quick of gizmag.com posted a chart provided by the company that shows a potential distance of 450 miles on a single charge. Of course the driver would have to limit speed to about 25 mph, but it's possible.

Quick says the company plans to issue a prize to the first customer who logs more than 400 miles on a charge. More likely drivers will see their range between 250 and 350 miles, he says.

That range beats the pants off other electrics and makes the car more likely to win converts from the internal-combustion crowd.

Turning dreams into reality

And it makes me want one. This kind of interest in a car reminds me of my dream back in high school. Then I was deep into 1950s retro and Hot Rod magazine.

I daydreamed of a 1957, or 1956 (I wasn't too proud), Chevy Nomad. Black. In fact, I just spotted one on Blackstone Avenue in Fresno, Calif. A Bel-Air version in mint condition. It looked awesome but didn't quite have the same appeal to my present-day self. I ended up in high school (class of '79) with a $300 1963 Ford Galaxie. Four-door land yacht. Still, I loved the stupid thing.

The Model S has a taste of the exotic. In fact, it looks far more high-end than its price would indicate.

I recently stumbled across a peek at an Austin Martin DBS concept car that shared a look similar to the Model S's sweeping lines and tough, eat-you-for-dinner grill and front end. Not bad. To me the DB series will always be one of the coolest cars ever.

So if my fortunes change and I'm following this particular daydream to reality, you can expect to see me picking out a color and adding custom features to my own Model S. Yeah, right.

Electric car bulletin: Tesla posts losses, Ford & Fisker prepare EV debut

Electric cars have been on the road a measly few months and they're already dominating automotive news.

Tesla posted first-quarter losses nearly double those of a year earlier. Ford plans to begin production of its electric Focus late this year. And Fisker stands to be the second major independent automaker to launch commercial production and sales of an electric car.

Expect more to come. The sector once was only a partially forgotten memory relived by people who had seen the 2006 documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

But now it promises to get increasingly active as the year rolls on and buyers appear. Utilities are talking about recharging centers and retailers are planning to stock home-charging devices as more and more of the vehicles enter the commuting landscape.

Detroit automaker Ford plans to join Nissan, Chevy and sports car builder Tesla with commercial-scale production of electric vehicles in the United States. But it looks to be beaten to the punch by Fisker Automotive, which intends to deliver its long-delayed 403-horsepower Karma to showrooms in June or July, according to a story by Katie Fehrenbacher at earth2tech.com.

Ford advertises the EV Focus as guilt-free.

The car offers a 6.6 kilowatt on-board charger that enables it to be recharged in half the time it takes for the Nissan Leaf or Chevy Volt, says Nick Chambers of plugincars.com. Of course, with the Volt's smaller battery, that difference works out to about the same amount of recharging time.

"The Focus Electric looks like a true competitor and will likely make Leaf fence sitters think twice — and may even cause some current Leaf orders to give up their place in line," Chambers writes.

Like the Leaf, the Focus Electric has a 100-mile range. Ford says the car will come with "electric-vehicle-specific features," specifically a custom Ford MyTouch instrument cluster, which allows the driver to keep tabs on the battery charge status, the distance to the next charging point and expected "range surplus" as well as mess with other information. The car also has a Microsoft feature that tells the owner when to get the cheapest utility rates for recharging.

Fisker is flush, having raised more than $1 billion in equity, loans and grants, says Fehrenbacher, citing U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The latest is $100 million from Chicago-based Advanced Equities Inc. That should help the automaker ride out the bumpy road Tesla's taken as the pioneer in the market. The Karma sedan is expected to sell for a princely $96,000 but go 0 to 60 in 5.9 seconds.

Tesla posted losses in the quarter that ended March 31, 2011 of $48.9 million, up 66 percent from the same period a year earlier. The Palo Alto automaker's stock closed at $27.55 per share, down 12 cents, on May 13. (A Friday by the way.)

In its SEC 10-Q form, the company said it remains dependent on revenue generated from the sale of its Tesla Roadster, "in the near term, and our future success will be dependent upon our ability to design and achieve market acceptance of new vehicle models, and specifically the Model S."

Tesla officials said the company will stop making the Roadster in December but will continue selling the model until all units are gone. Production on the Roadster began in 2008.

Tesla's planned sedan, the Model S, is expected to begin production sometime in the middle of 2012. However, officials say it "requires significant investment prior to commercial introduction, and may never be successfully developed or commercially successful."

The company appeared to be issuing a reality check in its filing, explaining that there can be no assurances that the Model S, which will have a $50,000 price tag, will prove to be a viable car as it is based on unproven components, will be built in a Fremont plant that may cost to much to equip and may have different styling and design than that of the concept vehicle and turn off consumers.

All of it just goes to show that any venture is a risk. Tesla's taking a big one, and its executives made note of that in very frank language. Still, the company had received about 4,300 reservations for the Model S as of March 31, 2011.

And gas prices likely won't go down too much.