Tesla may begin delivering Roadsters with temporary transmissions[will fail in a few thousand miles]

autoblog.com ^ | Dec 13th 2007 | John Neff

[grundle]

The skinny is that Tesla is having a difficult time developing a transmission strong enough to "survive the process of shifting gears while the motor remains at full torque", according to our own Sam Abuelsamid who has been following the Roadster's development from Day 1 and has actually rode shotgun in it. Two suppliers are currently working simultaneously to find a solution. Meanwhile, the company has gone ahead and built the first production model at the Lotus factory in Hethel, England. The first car belongs to Elon Musk, Chairman of the company and one of its initial investors. His car is fitted, however, with a transmission that he knows will fail in a few thousand miles.

Tesla also revealed that it is considering shipping some preordered Roadsters to customers early with similar transmissions that will be temporary and later replaced with the stronger transmission once it's developed.

[grundle]

The fact that Tesla Motors chose to withhold this information from hundreds of people who already paid a deposit on this car is very, very wrong.

[Calpernia]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1C44JQU7Pc
Tesla Roadster

[TheBattman]

If I were an investor (or customer) - I would divest (or demand my deposit back).

[grundle]

Ping!

[SoldierMedic]

I’m hoping that Tesla will offer to to pay for any transmission replacements that need to be peformed, and that a permanant fix will be found soon.

I am so excited about this car, this is very disappointing.

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[tje]

Usually this sort of thing can be handled through programming, but I know the torque curve of an electric motor is very different than that of an internal combustion engine. But still...

[grundle]

OK. Thanks for explaining it to me.

[damondonion]

Sounds like very stupid business to me; no gasoline powered car would survive more than a couple of months without a clutch of some sort and it sounds like that’s what might be missing.

[lowbridge]

No room for groceries or luggage...

Room enough for a chick.

And that's all that really matters. :-)

[NonValueAdded]

Innovators always assume some measure of product and delivery risk. It is unseemly for them to whine about it.

[Grut]

His car is fitted, however, with a transmission that he knows will fail in a few thousand miles.

Ford makes Tesla? ;^)

[Brad from Tennessee]

Given the success rate for these kind of endeavors I didn’t think they’d get this far. I hope they get this transmission problem solved and stay in production.

[raybbr]

[Travis McGee]

Boy Genius Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind this car, overruled his design team and demanded a gear box. His engineers wanted a gearless pure electric drive, but he insisted. Hoisted on his own petard of hubris.

[rlmorel]

Good God. Note how the first post underneath it is a exhortation from a Ron Paul lunatic. What is that all about?

I sure wouldn’t mind having one of those things...if the transmission worked correctly...and someone bought the thing for me!

[Calpernia]

Lunatic or not; Ron Paul has a large number of people getting him visibility.

As for cars, I’m partial to classics.

[grundle]

Thanks for the link. That is a great article.

But that doesn't change the fact that Tesla should have told customers about this problem before they took money for the car. Tesla has repeatedly said that the car required almost no maintenence, so this newly revealed information contradicts that claim.

[rlmorel]

I presume you are an advocate of Hunter’s campaign? I am as well...but I disagree about Ron Paul the “large number of people getting him visibility”. I think it is a smaller number of people slavishly spending their time and money to inflate his perceived influence. And a lot of them are Libs. And a lot of libs want to foster this viewpoint, because they somehow think he is going to draw more conservatives than liberals.

As for cars...I am partial to American cars from 1955-1972. I had a dream last night that I needed some work done on my broken down car, but had no money so I offered to do mechanic’s work in exchange (used to be a jet mechanic, so I can turn a wrench when needed).

They took me in, and offered to take me to lunch if I purchased a 1972 Plymouth Roadrunner from them. I looked at it, noted all the rust, and they said we were taking it to lunch. As we piled in to drive it to lunch (they made me drive)the bloody thing had a front end so out of alignment that I had to turn the wheels at nearly right angles to make it go straight...and the brakes were so dilapadated that when I put it in gear, it rolled backwards and smashed into a couple of other junkers they had there. Then, as I went forward, I sideswiped another junker because I hadn’t figured out the front end mangulation yet. I thought to myself, “This is one hell of a first impression I am making here...”

I have NO idea what that dream meant.