Published by Green by Design under Transportation

How would you like to zip around the freeways in a sleek, eerily silent sports car made of carbon-fiber, equipped with state-of-the-art electronics and emitting no greenhouse gases (GHG) at all?

You are probably dreaming of a futuristic electric car—or more likely, one that already exists in limited numbers: the Tesla Roadster, to be precise.

Named after the 19th century eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla, whose legacy includes the AC power systems and the foundations of electromagnetism, the namesake sports car has caught the fancy of both driving enthusiasts and super-green conservationists.

Unlike the Prius or the Honda Civic hybrids, the Tesla Roadster is pure electric—which means zero pollution emission. It is not a clunky or weird-looking vehicle used in science fiction movies or demonstrations but in fact, a magnificent automotive creature to behold, and with its 248-hp electric motor, a mean machine to drive.

There aren’t many working models to watch for. To date, Tesla Motors, the San Carlos, California-based company that builds the car, tallies a limited corps of customers; the 100th new owner took possession of his Tesla keys on December 9 of last year. Tesla considered the event to be its rite of passage to mainstream business.

The dealer price tag of $109,000 discourages mere mortals like you or me from schemes of owning one. The design engineers and the venture capitalists behind the project knew beforehand that manufacturing wouldn’t come cheap. That was not the manufacturers’ intention.

In fact, Martin Eberhard, engineer, serial entrepreneur and the first CEO of Tesla Motors, conceived the idea of the car while driving the streets of Palo Alto in 2003 when he noticed that many driveways in which a Toyota Prius or a Honda Civic glowed proud also featured a Porsche or a Lexus. It dawned on him that these people weren’t buying these hybrids to save on gas.

“They were buying to make a statement on the environment,” Eberhard concluded.

Still, doubters are quick to point out that the Teslas’ massive rechargeable battery packs will ultimately lose efficiency and suffer the ignominy of consignment to a landfill. The battery pack consists of nearly seven thousand 3.7-volt lithium-ion cells—the same battery found in the latest laptops and cell phones. They meet strict environmental requirements such as the RoHS standard.

The battery pack is free of toxic heavy metals or cancer-producing condensed organics. In fact, the battery pack is not meant to end up in the landfill, so much as in the Recyclers’ Lab. There, it will be transformed via a sort of reverse alchemy, rendered into pulp from which reusable components may be extracted — e.g., cobalt and nickel.

It is certainly less toxic than the standard lead-acid batteries found in most gasoline cars.

Elon Musk, the Tesla’s current driving force and public face, came into the picture later, after Eberhard’s struggling project was deemed to be burning too much cash. Unlike Eberhard, who only wanted to build a car he would buy himself, Musk had a greater idea: he wanted to show that the electric car is the next big thing in land travel and that the Big Three in Detroit had it all wrong in ditching their electric car initiatives and concentrating on hybrids.

Being green was farthest from Musk’s mind. He is a savvy entrepreneur who made it big when he cashed out after the internet-payment company PayPal he co-founded was sold to Ebay for $1.5 billion in 2002. He is now chairman of SolarCity, a large residential solar provider in California, and CEO of SpaceX, which envisions sending tourists up to the space station as a prelude to commercial space travel.

And now, Musk is the power behind Tesla Motors.

“I’m not too hard-core about being green,” he admitted during a recent interview in Popular Science. “I think it leads to a very constrained life.”

Ironically or not, Musk is now hailed as greenest of the green.

And the Tesla Roadster ends up being a hybrid of a different sort, melding elegant design and environmentalism.