Ballyboughal.net

There is a new kid on the block packing a whole lot of punch that even your local tree hugger would embrace. It looks the business, its mean, its sporty, in fact its got so much torque they’ve had to design a 3rd generation transmission to keep it under control.

It will stand up and roll over to any competition on Irish Roads, XKR’s, Aston Martins, BMW, Mercedes etc and its battery powered, yes think duracell bunny on speed.

Its the Tesla Roadster, wait, get this… its 100% electric, t goes from 0-60 mph (not kilometers) in 4 seconds, it has a faster over taking acceleration speed (between 30-70 mph) than any other production car AND does roughly 135 miles to the gallon, which is less than 2 cents (USD) per mile as Robert Scoble said WOW!

Robert had the pleasure of not just your average test drive, he got to witness the cars true wild side in a Santa Monica street race against Jason Calacanis in a Corvette, see photo of Jason standing behind his Corvette below.

The lads go one better by using QIK to stream live video of the event onto the Web.

Check out Jasons QIK video introducing Robert as he goes for a ride in the Tesla

See Roberts fly on the wall QIK video from within the Tesla.

We’re all looking to go more eco friendly on th Emerald Isle, using those oddly coloured wheelie bins but lets be honest Smart Cars just didn’t cut it. They may be practical but man they are goofy. Take a look at the Tesla Roadster, its a babe in knee high boots, you’ll turn, you’ll look, you’ll stare, you’ll bite your lip as you run you hand along its lines and wish like a school boy.

The bad news is I’d say the nearest distributor will be UK based (I hope not), and then we have the refueling recharging problem I don’t know of any capable stations in Dublin or Ireland. I wonder (bit of a fantasy going on here) if it would be possible to charge at home, if so that would be awesome and a serious unique selling point.

Robert says on his post Tesla is working on a sedan (saloon) model costing around 50, 000 USD which is roughly €34,000. Thats very reasonable when you consider the fuel economy.

If the government had any brains they could encourage companies to consider these as fleet cars, or go one step further and work with the Irish Taxi Federation to encourage its members to move over from conventional fuels by granting the drivers with the same value tax credit equivalent over a 3 year period.

Check out Roberts original post here, you can almost feel his excitement and buzz!

Paul Walsh is currently over in Barcelona at The Mobile World Congress 2008 . He was enjoying himself so much with Pat Phelan, Niall Larkin, Florian Seroussi, Daniel Appelquist, Loren Feldman (his ramble buddy) and the rest he decided over a skype call that he was going to stick about for “another day”.

He ask me to search about for the best value return flight, which I found with Ryan Air cheap as chips, but thats where it all goes funny. After booking Paul says he doesn’t want to fly to London Stanstead, so he asks me to book EasyJet. I book the return flight for Feb 14th but when I read the booking confirmation it stated his return flight was Feb 15th!!

As you can imagine @paulwalsh’s initial reaction, I’m *NOT* staying until f’in Friday and throws toys out of the cot (little did he know). When the tears stopped and after giving it some thought Paul decides to take the earlier Ryan Air flight. Luckily, I managed to finally get through to a person at EasyJet and luckily got a complete cancellation.

Did it all end there? Well lets see what Paul has to say