Quote:
Originally Posted by mopho
Having been in the car, it definitely is an interesting experience and very neat, but I still miss the noise. For me, the engine noise is a large part of the enjoyment of cars. Just putting a sporty exhaust on a car that is not even that fast, makes the car "feel" faster and more fun to drive.
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...certainly there's a lot of visceral experience which is fundamental to the appeal of our lotus cars - their proper manual gearboxes, mechanical steering, fixed differentials, and such as opposed to arguably better-performing and less-fussy sequential shifters, modulated steering, independent traction control, and similar systems which are increasingly common in most cars made today - and i think the feel of a rumbling explosion barely harnessed within a heavy block right behind our seats is a huge part of that raw connection which keeps us away from something like the tesla or the GT-R...
...at nearly twice the weight of an elise, the tesla won't handle anywhere in the same league, but then it's really an american car designed for an american performance envelope...two hundred twenty miles range is about what we might expect from a single tank of spirited driving in an elise, perfectly usable for just about anyone's daily driving needs, and although not enough to carry a proper morning's run through the twisties, that sort of driving clearly isn't meant to be the tesla's forte - its transmission is only rated for a couple thousand miles under normal use...
...the tesla is really more noteworthy as a (pending) business achievement than a herald of revolutionary technology: general motors' second-generation impulse/EV1 was achieving three-quarters the range nearly ten years ago, and the third-generation tropica/zebra sportscars managed over one-and-one-thirds the range with similar performance for about half the price...