Tesla Roadster: First Impressions

I've now had my Tesla Roadster for more than 24 hours. I picked it up on Monday, which is the same day they delivered their 100th car. It's a lot of fun to drive, that's for sure. In fact, my neck hurts from all the acceleration!

As others have noted, getting into and out of the car takes a bit of acrobatic acumen. As you can see from the first picture, the car has a soft top that you roll up to remove. There is also a hard top, but they aren't delivering those with the cars yet. It's another body panel so by leaving it out, Tesla can deliver more cars per week. This is the correct choice in my opinion. I can wait on the hard top.

I have noticed some condensation in the passenger side headlamp. The brakes are making a strange noise which my son describes as a whale sound. The folks at Telsa Motors say they are looking into the condensation issue. I haven't asked them about the brakes, but Lawrence tells me it's pretty normal for the brakes on high performance cars to be noisy for the first 1,000 miles or so.




My friend Lawrence Sinclair is visiting from Saigon and we went for a spin. He shot the above photos and a couple of fun video clips of us driving it around the neighborhood hills. Here's one of the clips. I have a longer one, but I haven't had time to edit it down.