Tesla Company Information
Tesla Roadster prototypes were introduced in July of 2006 to the collective "wow" of the automotive industry and sports car-enthusiast world, and was even featured on the cover of Time Magazine in the December 2006 issue as the recipient of the magazine's "Best Inventions 2006 - Transportation Invention" award. Sure Tesla Motors' radical new sports car was beginning to look like vaporware early in 2008 as the Silicon Valley automaker failed to deliver its first car on time and the entire auto industry was sniggering, but let's cut Tesla some slack?does any regular automaker always get its stuff onto the showroom floor dead on schedule? Especially its paradigm-shift products? Of course not. Orders are now well on their way of being filled, and as of June 2009, more than 500 Tesla Roadsters have been delivered, with the first production model delivered to Elon Musk, Chairman of the Board, in February, 2008. The Tesla Roadster was developed with design help from Lotus Cars, who supplied some chassis development technology from the Lotus Elise as well as roughly 7 percent of the parts, which is all well considering the Elise's excellent sporting and driving characteristics are now shared with the Tesla Roadster.