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Amazing images of Tesla cars
Tesla Motors is a Silicon Valley-based company that designs, manufactures and sells electric cars and electric vehicle powertrain components.
Tesla Motors is a public company that trades on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the symbol TSLA.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
Tesla Motors gained widespread attention by producing the Tesla Roadster, the first fully electric sports car. Tesla also sells electric powertrain components, including lithium-ion battery packs, to other automakers, including Daimler and Toyota.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
Market analysts have called for Tesla to focus its efforts on supplying powertrain components to major automakers, which have the resources to mass produce electric cars.
Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, has said he envisions Tesla as an independent automaker.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
Tesla has been developing the Model S, a fully electric luxury sedan. Although expensive, it is substantially cheaper than the Roadster.
Eventually, Tesla Motors aims to mass produce fully electric cars at a price that would be affordable to the average consumer.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
Tesla Motors is named after electrical engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla. The Tesla Roadster uses an AC motor descended directly from Tesla's original 1882 design.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
The Tesla Roadster, the company's first vehicle, is the first production automobile to use lithium-ion battery cells and the first production EV with a range greater than 320km per charge.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
The base model accelerates 0 to 60 mph (97km/h) in 3.7 seconds and, according to Tesla Motor's environmental analysis, is twice as energy efficient as the Toyota Prius.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
As of June 30, 2011, Tesla had delivered more than 1,840 Roadsters in at least 30 countries. Tesla has said that it will produce a total serial production run of 2,400 Roadsters.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
Tesla began producing right-hand-drive Roadsters in early 2010 for the United Kingdom and Ireland markets, then expanded sales to right-hand-drive markets of Australia, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
One of Tesla's stated goals is to increase the number and variety of EVs available to mainstream consumers in three ways: Tesla sells its own vehicles in a growing number of company-owned showrooms and online.
It sells patented electric powertrain components to other automakers so that they may get their own EVs to customers sooner.
And it serves as a catalyst and positive example to other automakers, demonstrating that there is pent-up consumer demand for vehicles that are both high-performance and efficient.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
General Motors' then-Vice Chairman Robert Lutz said in 2007 that the Tesla Roadster inspired him to push GM to develop the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid sedan that aims to reverse years of dwindling market share and massive financial losses for America's largest automaker.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
In an August 2009 edition of The New Yorker, Lutz was quoted as saying: "All the geniuses here at General Motors kept saying lithium-ion technology is 10 years away, and Toyota agreed with us - and boom, along comes Tesla. So I said: 'How come some tiny little California startup, run by guys who know nothing about the car business, can do this, and we can't?' That was the crowbar that helped break up the log jam."
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk won the 2010 Automotive Executive of the Year Innovator Award for hastening the development of electric vehicles throughout the global automotive industry.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
The Tesla Roadster has a base price of $109,000, (not including numerous tax incentives, credits and waivers). Tesla's goal is to sell EVs to mainstream consumers at more affordable prices - but Tesla purposely aimed its first production vehicle at "early adopters" so that the company could optimize the technology before cascading it down to less expensive vehicles.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
The company's subsequent car, the Model S sedan, is anticipated to begin production for the 2012 model year with a base price of $57,400 (or $49,900 after a US federal tax credit), roughly half that of the Roadster.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
The company then plans to launch a $30,000 vehicle, codenamed BlueStar.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
Tesla also builds electric powertrain components for more affordable cars, including the lowest priced car from Daimler, the Smart urban commuter car; the lowest priced car to carry the Mercedes badge, the A-Class hatch back; and the lowest priced SUV from Toyota, the RAV4.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
Aiming premium products at affluent "thought leaders" is a well known business strategy in Silicon Valley and the global technology industry, where prices for the first versions of mobile phones, laptop computers and flat-screen televisions start high but drop in subsequent product cycles.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
However, this approach has been relatively rare in the global auto industry, where the prevailing business model has been one of mass production in assembly plants optimised to build hundreds of thousands of vehicles per year with comparatively low sticker prices.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
In 2003, two independent teams, consisting of Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning and Ian Wright on the one hand, and Elon Musk and JB Straubel on the other, both sought to commercialise the T-Zero prototype electric sports car created by AC Propulsion.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
Since college, Musk's primary goal was to commercialise electric vehicles all the way to mass market, starting with a premium sports car aimed at early adopters and then moving as rapidly as possible into more mainstream vehicles, including sedans and affordable compacts.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
Tom Gage, the president of AC Propulsion, suggested that the two teams join forces to maximise the chances of success. They agreed to merge their efforts, with Musk becoming chairman and overall head of product design, Eberhard becoming CEO and Straubel becoming CTO.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
Musk took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design at a detailed level, but was not deeply involved in the day to day business operations; Eberhard acknowledged that Musk was the person who insisted from the beginning on a carbon fibre body, and he led design of components ranging from the power electronics module to the headlamps and other styling cues.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
In addition to his daily operational roles, Musk was the controlling investor in Tesla from the first financing round, funding the large majority of the Series A capital investment round of $7.5 million with personal funds.
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Amazing images of Tesla cars
From the beginning, Musk consistently maintained that Tesla's long-term strategic goal was to create affordable mass market electric vehicles in order to have a material impact on oil consumption.
Musk received the Global Green 2006 product design award for his design of the Tesla Roadster, presented by Mikhail Gorbachev, and he received the 2007 Index Design award for his design of the Tesla Roadster.