Your retinas have been treated to plenty of external shots of Tesla's Roadster, but have you ever stopped to wonder what kind of excitement sat just southwest of the steering wheel? CNET's UK branch managed to get their camcorder within a Roadster parked on display over in Britain, and what they found was a rather robust interface that enables owners to get all sorts of involved with how and when the car charges. The representative did note that typical navigation functions were controlled via the JVC head unit, but the small panel just under the gauges enables motorists to control a number of aspects in relation to charging. There's even a guide that explains which choices are cheaper and more beneficial for the long-term life of the battery. Have a look at the video in the read link.

[Via Digg]

The Tesla roadster goes from 0 to 60 in 3.9-seconds (by December anyway) and costs $100,000 if you're lucky enough to get dibs on the 10 or so electric cars delivered so far. Come to find out, it also goes from 30 to 0 in a nausea-filled second when ground to a halt of twisted carbon-fiber beneath a Mercedes. The image above was snapped by Alex Volkov at the scene of a Friday evening accident in San Francisco. Of course, this isn't the first wrecked Tesla we've seen. According to Fortune, ousted co-founder Martin Eberhard suffered further distress when his Tesla rear-ended a truck en route for delivery to Eberhard's home. While the cause of the new accident isn't official, a few eye-witnesses said that Tesla #6 -- driven and owned by an unidentified man -- had gone "unnoticed" as it went "bumper-to-bumper between the cars." Interestingly enough, the Tesla's air-bags never deployed. One thing seems obvious: we expect to see more crashes from the silent, ultra-low-profile Tesla street-racer as it attempts to compete for space on roads dominated by SUVs, Hummers, and Testosterone.

Read -- SF Tesla Crash
Read -- Fortune

Tesla might have finally started shipping Roadsters, but it just can't stop getting sued -- this time the upstart automaker is being haled into court by former public relations director David Vespremi, who was fired in 2007 during that odd upheaval that saw co-founder Martin Eberhard demoted and finally given the boot. Vespremi isn't all too happy about the situation -- his complaint alleges that Tesla, Tesla CEO Ze'ev Drori and VP of marketing Darryl Siry violated California labor law, made disparaging comments about him and other former employees, and dealt with him in bad faith. That's not unusual for a disgruntled employee, but Vespremi is so confident that Tesla's been screwing people left and right that he's asked for class action certification, which is pretty ballsy but could potentially cause some interesting problems for Tesla. We'll see where this one goes -- Tesla can be pretty prickly, so we're not sure a quick settlement is necessarily in the making.

Disclaimer: Nilay's a lawyer and a fan of electron-based transport, but he's not your lawyer and none of this is legal advice or analysis.

[Via AutoblogGreen; warning, PDF read link]

Move over, Elon Musk -- the Tesla owners club is about to get bigger. The upstart electric-car company announced the delivery of the first nine production Roadsters to customers in California earlier this week, with several more to follow at the rate of four per week, and the plan is to start building 100 a month by December, when that new transmission is ready. That's pretty ambitious, but Tesla's brought in some big guns to help make it happen -- the company just hired Mike Donoughe as EVP of Vehicle Engineering and Manufacturing. Donoughe is fresh off a 24-year stint at Chrysler, where he was most recently in charge of revamping all of the company's mid-size sedans. Word on the street is that Donoughe could have written his own ticket at any major carmaker, so it's interesting that he landed at Tesla, where he'll be working on the Model S as well as the Roadster. Oh, and there's a new Tesla store in Menlo Park, in case you were looking to blow a quick $100K in Silicon Valley -- aren't we all?

If you've got the coin to roll deep enough to own a Tesla Roadster, we'd imagine that making sure the car gets its 8 (or fewer) hour charge from a 220v / 80A circuit (like what powers some larger home appliances) won't be a huge issue. But if not, think twice about your driving schedule with the all-electric sports car, because while you can technically power a Roadster from any standard wall outlet, the amount of draw a standard 110v / 15A plug delivers would mean a 30 hour wait to juice up your vehicle's thousand pound battery pack. Thankfully, Tesla owners have time to think over how to deal with these kinds of details, being that none of the customers who've pre-ordered a car have yet received theirs.

[Via Autoblog Green]

Man, Tesla's been busy today -- in addition to the announcement of the Model S and Elon Musk's promise of a sub-$30K electric car in four years, word on the street is that the company's inked a deal with Daimler AG to supply it with lithium-ion batteries for upcoming electric cars. Daimler's CEO has said the company was open to leasing battery tech to get out an electric Smart by 2010 and it's rumored that the German marque is looking to ditch gas entirely by 2015, so going to Tesla, which has been working on battery tech for some time, isn't a totally out there proposition. Just a rumor for now -- given Tesla's generally-prickly relationships with others, we'd wait for an official announcement before getting too excited about a Roadster-powered SLR, but it's certainly intriguing.

Our favorite Terminator (and Governor of California) Arnold Schwarzenegger has just helped Tesla Motors make an announcement that's probably sending chills through traditional automaker's boardrooms. The company has just introduced a fully-electric, five passenger sports sedan dubbed the Model S, which will be selling for $60,000, and will manage 225 miles on a full charge. The carmaker says it will produce the vehicles in a brand new manufacturing plant it's opening in Northern California. We're on the ground at the announcement right now -- no pictures or release date have surfaced yet, but you'll know more as soon as we do.

NVIDIA's Tesla GPU-based high-performance computing workstations and add-in cards have been on the market for a whole year now, and to celebrate, they're getting birthday cake, balloons, and an upgrade to GT200-based chipsets. Like AMD's recently-announced FireStream 9250, the new T10P processing units are capable of breaking the teraflop barrier, up from the first gen's paltry 518 GFlops, and they're up to 240 cores from the first gen's 128. You'll have to shell out to get all that horsepower, though: the entry-level, 900GFlops C1060 PCI card will sell for $1699, while the four-GPU 1U S1070 blade will sell for $7995 for two PCIe-interface version or $8295 for the single PCIe connect model. The standalone Tesla workstation has been discontinued, as customers were increasingly buying the cards, so it looks like those are really fast collectors' items for now. So, who's going to be the first to add one of these bad boys to the Engadget Folding@Home team?

[Via Tom's Hardware, thanks Matan]

Those Tesla folks are finally (almost) out of the woods on this whole powertrain nonsense. Its original two-speed design had many "durability, efficiency and cost challenges," but Tesla Motors decided to go with it in its first production run, and then swap in the new single-speed "1.5" powertrain once they get it just right. It's a bit funny Tesla 'fessing up to durability problems now, after denying them so vehemently before, but either way buyers of the first 40 cars that'll ship with the old powertrain won't have to wait long for an upgrade, since the 1.5 powertrain has been finalized and is slated for production in August. Tesla already has a 1.5 version they're driving regularly, and they're in the testing phase. 1.5 involves improvements to the motor, inverter and gearbox design, and improves torque among other things -- which gives that 3.9 second 0-60 spec they've always wanted.

Believe it or not, tesla coils are good for more than just creating lighting, protecting one's laptop or cranking out a sweet tune -- and the folks watching a dazzling demonstration at Maker Faire 2008 can attest to that. Apparently a group of prototype (1 / 12 scale, no less) coils were seen sparking up the evening in San Mateo, California, but it wasn't the visual energy or unmistakable hum that caused all that saliva to form in the mouths of onlookers. Oh no, it was the fact that a dozen hot dogs were simultaneously roasted and made ready for safe consumption. Check out a video of the action right after the break.

Nary two months after the Tesla Roadster finally hit production, the automaker's first dealership has swung its doors wide open. Not surprisingly, the establishment is planted in gridlock heaven, better known as Los Angeles, California. Even less shocking is the fact that it opened at one of the busiest intersections in the city -- near the practically useless (we kid... sort of) 405 freeway and the always-packed corner of Santa Monica and Sepulveda boulevards. Of course, the 10,000-square-foot dealership isn't exactly rolling cars off of the showroom floor just yet (something about a lingering transmission issue), but it's hoping the $2 million cost of construction more than pays itself off in a couple of years. And if you're hankering for a Tesla Motors store near you, you can look forward to others popping up in Menlo Park (CA), New York, Miami, Seattle and Chicago in the next year or so.

The drama surrounding the Tesla Roadster's transmission and the company's attempts to build a system that can transmit power from the motor to the wheels without breaking under the strain took another strange twist today, with the revelation the that first supplier Tesla contracted to design the part is suing the company for $5.6M. Magna Powertrain USA says Tesla hired it to develop a two-speed transmission in September 2006, and when things fell behind schedule, Tesla canceled the contract and walked away without paying. Saucy! Of course, problems with the proposed two-speed transmission are why Tesla plans to ship early production Roadsters with "temporary" one-speed units and swap them out later, but there's no word on where the two-speed versions are going to come from apart from Tesla saying "We need to have more control over our fate and manage the process in house." Sure, sure, just as long as we get one for "testing," okay?

Tesla Motors can't seem to keep itself out of the press, can it? The newest flare-up concerns rival Fisker and claims that the automaker has stolen trade secrets and copied design concepts. In a lawsuit filed Monday by Tesla, the carmaker accuses Henrik Fisker -- whom the company had hired to design its WhiteStar sedan -- of accepting the work to "gain access to confidential design information and trade secrets." The company alleges that Fisker then used that knowledge to launch a competing vehicle, and believes Fisker has implemented its range-extended vehicle (or REV) technology in the recently introduced Karma. "I think it's ironic that Fisker chose to name his car the Karma, when what he's done is very bad karma," said the company's lawyer. Fisker wouldn't comment on the case, then drove silently away when pressed.

[Via CNET]

Here at Engadget HQ, we have a certain respect for tesla-based DIY endeavors. That being said, we still can't fathom who in their right mind would actually fling sparks around their laptop just to feel a little closer to that WoW raid. Nevertheless, the High voltage "antivirus" protection project claims to play nice with Macs or PCs and utilizes a ZVS flyback supply driving a 4-stage CW multiplier. According to the mad scientist who arranged this thing, the shot on the right was taken by a camera forced to hold its shutter open for ten seconds before capturing, and he even took a number of shots (check 'em all in the read link) to defuse the "Photoshopped!1one!" arguments. If you can't sense the fear in our fingertips, trust us, it's there.

Remember a few dozen years ago when we heard the first batch of 100 Tesla Roadsters had sold out? Us neither, but we're assuming those were heady days. Since then we've seen delays, setbacks and untimely retirements, but Tesla Motors claims it finally has the car under production, and is naturally taking orders for the 2009 run -- 900 cars have been reserved so far. Despite the concrete language in this press release, we'll believe it when these silent beasts start hitting the road. And run our cycling-asses down.