Teslas go for a spin at Thayer

By Malika Khurana | 11/10/11 2:12pm

You’ve been dri­ving for three hours since you left Hanover, so you de­cide to pull over some­where in the mid­dle of Con­necti­cut for a bite. With two hours left to drive to New York City, you plug in your car for a quick recharge while you eat.

Is this the fu­ture of au­to­mo­biles? Tesla thinks so. Henry Sharpe, a local Tesla owner, came to Thayer last Sat­ur­day to show off his Tesla Road­ster and talk about the car.

Tesla Mo­tors makes elec­tric cars that use recharge­able lithium-ion bat­ter­ies. These bat­ter­ies, sim­i­lar to those used in lap­top com­put­ers, might not seem like a vi­able al­ter­na­tive to gaso­line, but the stats would sur­prise you.

·A fully charged bat­tery gives you 245 miles, or about 5 hours of dri­ving at 50 mph, which is al­most enough to get you from Hanover to New York City.

·Tesla cars can be charged out of a con­ven­tional 110-volt or 220-volt power out­let, or at an elec­tric car charg­ing sta­tion.

·Each charge takes four to six hours (de­pend­ing on the charg­ing source) and costs about $5.

·Tesla cars emit half of the CO2 that pe­tro­leum-fu­eled cars do.

When I asked Sharpe why he chose to in­vest in a six-digit elec­tric car (it’s not every day you see a bright red sports car in New Hamp­shire—can you say cop tar­get?), he said it was mostly for po­lit­i­cal and en­vi­ron­men­tal rea­sons: he didn’t want to sup­port mo­nop­o­lis­tic oil com­pa­nies and their lob­by­ists. But it was easy to see that once he owned the car, he started to love every­thing about it.

As soon as every­one dis­cov­ers the se­cret of elec­tric cars, no one is going to buy gas-pow­ered cars,” he said.

I’m sure he would agree when I say that Tesla is mak­ing sus­tain­abil­ity sexy (as if it wasn’t al­ready).