The Tesla Roadster was a groundbreaking car and launched a company that has altered the course of automotive history. What we hear less about these days, though, is how it actually performed as a ...

Way back in the land of 2008, Tesla was a little-known electric carmaker whose first production car was the Roadster, an all-electric sports car based on the Lotus Elise. The first 100 of those ...

Despite what you might've heard, the first-gen Tesla Roadster is iconic, unique to the core, and 93 percent different from the Lotus Elise. The Tesla Roadster's story is one of ambition ...

"We used a highly modified [Lotus] Elise chassis [for the Tesla Roadster], the body was all completely different," admitted Tesla CEO. "By the way, it was a super dumb strategy that we actually did." ...

Its dashboard is carried over from the Lotus Elise. This fact and the Lotus-inspired exterior design have led some to believe the Tesla roadster is merely an electrified Elise—a claim that Tesla ...

Tesla wanted the Roadster to handle as much like an Elise as possible, while utilizing an electric powertrain that refrained from pumping nasty greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. With Lotus ...

The Tesla Roadster proves the sound brilliance of the Lotus Elise chassis by showing that even with 990 extra pounds of batteries stuffed into it, the car is still fun to drive. Granted ...

As the Model 3 and Model Y take the world by storm, Tesla's success can be traced back to one vehicle: the Roadster. Based on the Lotus Elise, the Roadster went live for the 2008 model year.

but if it’s everything they have then something must have gone very wrong in the Tesla archives. It’s possible someone might take a Lotus Elise and produce something close to a Roadster ...

Tesla's cars have come an extremely long way from the original Roadster launched toward the end of the 2000s, yet this model remains a vital product for the brand, as it has helped shape it.

Modifying an old Lotus into ... that’s how Tesla started. Of course, electric vehicles are no longer novel, so the idea of another startup following the Tesla Roadster’s example might not ...

The original Tesla Roadster was the company’s first car and was essentially a Tesla powertrain in the body of a Lotus Elise. But the new Roadster is its own thing — and it’s been designed ...