0-60 in 4 seconds. Say goodbye to the good 'ol days...

[What'saCobra?]

Absolutely correct. Had one, did that. Nice cruiser, dark blue with white interior and top. Hurst shifter was just fine and the motor was a serious stump-puller.

But, i used to run against other GTO's my other car, a nicely powered 1964 289 (CSX 24XX) with standard 3.77's. The shift points were 60, 80 & 100 at 7000 rpm. She had pretty decent Firestone Indy rain tires on the street that lasted about 5 or 6000 wonderful miles if i was just a little considerate. Very predictable break-away, even in the rain. Plenty of throttle-steering was available.

Sooo... when the other guy's GTO was in 4th gear, just about to come apart with excess rpm's (at about 100-105 mph), your's truly, already about two or three car lengths or more ahead, speed shifted into 4th and went into the sunset, far away... heh, heh, heh!

Pretty surprising for some GTO pilot that thought he could wipe out the little BRGreen Austin-Healey next to him at the light, with the noisey muffler.

Must have done it at least a dozen times... always fun to remember. But, i frequently would pull over when he was seriously far back, with heavy breaking. The poor fellow nearly always went past with all his wheels locked-up or at least with the nose seriously downward. He would come to a stop a ways down the road, slam it into reverse, come tearing back to my stop point and find me standing there waiting with my arms crossed.

Never failed to have a friend afterwards. They were, of course, not at all happy when the saw what they ran, but most didn't even have ANY idea wtf it was, even when clued. They just kept shaking their heads back and forth, trying to explain to themselves why it wasn't a fair run, 'cause the little green car was way too small...

[DanElam]

The local Santa Fe, NM paper had an article about the car last weekend. Apparently the car will be produced or at least partially produced in New Mexico. Tesla indicated that their plan is for the first car to come in at something around $100K. It will be a niche market play designed to get them some traction and let them move on to another car they expect to get down to the $50K mark for mass market sales. Tesla is being very secretive about actual performance demonstrations and no one has been able to verify their claims. Some have outright doubted their ability to deliver. The article did say that the car appears to be well put together and that the Lotus people have been helping. It also indicated that the only journalists tests have been with the car purposefully limited to second gear.

Still, the company seemed to have some bright guys and strong investors behind them. Certainly worth paying attention to.

[mj_duell]

Originally Posted by jerry w

I Hydrogen fuel tanks for cars will have to be enormous to produce a range of 300 miles like contemporary cars.

regards

Not to start a tizzy, but this is not true and is one of the reasons I have a hard time with the bias media. They seem intent on bringing down U.S. automakers so the uninformed will keep buying Toyotas and keep us shackled to giant oil companies. Hybrids are a stop gap; you still are dependant on oil. Plug-ins will eventually lead to a massive strain on electric grids that are already stretched to capacity. I have told many before who my wife is. She is one of the senior research scientists for GM's fuel cell program in New York. Current fuel cell technology yields a 107 mpg range when compared to gasoline. The truth is you will need much less space for fuel storage. Also, I don't know if any of you caught the future cars show on Discovery, but this is a very viable solution. The problems of production and supply have been pretty much solved by electrolysis via sunlight and other means by the Norwegians. The Japanese seem to be stealing all of the lime light, but rest assured GM has a program that is in step, if not ahead of them. I have been in the prototypes and I have seen the numbers. The performance of fuel cell powered electric vehicles is amazing and the solution works very well as a replacement for gasoline. Just my .02



--Mike