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 ...

While the Roadster began with a heavy influence from the Lotus Elise upon which it is roughly based, the Tesla now contains only traces of the Elise DNA as Tesla has developed its own edgy ...

"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." ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

In 2008, the original Tesla Roadster, which took inspiration from the Lotus Elise, created a crucial moment in auto history by merging cutting-edge technology with an audacious vision of the future.

A YouTube review of a 2008 Tesla Roadster shows how much the carmaker has evolved in 14 years. Tesla's first model was a tiny sports car that was built off a Lotus Elise. Since Tesla went public ...

The original Tesla Roadster, produced from ... Tesla Motors, as it was then known, worked with Lotus to develop an electric sports car using an elongated Elise chassis. With a 0-60 time of 3.7 ...

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 ...