The obvious question is, what does Fisker Automotive have to say about this?

Also, what kind of name is Elon Musk?

I quote, "We’ll see what people think of cars designed by me versus Fisker," Musk told the NYT. "It’s the amateur versus the professional”

... which implies he's the amateur and Fisker the professional. This must be correct, since it's considered unprofessional to hire an amateur so a professional Musk wouldn't hire an amateuristic Fisker. So the next Tesla is guaranteed to be an amateuristic enterprise? Where can I sign up for the delivery list?

Tesla's not-very-well-thought-out credo is or should be:

"Dilettantes of the world, Unite, or any acceptably ordered groupificationing, or whatever!” Revolutionary firebrands, the lot of em treehugging techies.

Fisker designed the Aston Martin DB9, and used to head up BMW's US design studio, so I wouldn't call him an amateur. It's a bit dim agreeing to design a vital component for the competition when you've got your own product in development though. This was always going to happen.

it's not about being green, it's about making it-and the best way to make the most of it in a hurry is thru snake oil sales and litigation.

Tesla developed no new technology, and apparently didn't bother to set up a real company to integrate existing technology into a production worthy vehicle. Hobbyists have built comparable performance numbers for even less money.

Like the "Phantom" game console, and that handheld game machine that was more a Mafia and Ferrari stealing front, Tesla shows it was never serious about making a difference. If they were, there wouldn't have been so many "delays" and "management" problems and all that other happy BS that covers up the corruption at the core.

For a company that is *already* producing real world vehicles for real world people, check this out: http://www.hybridtechnologies.com/

my personal favorite -

www.aptera.com

or if your being finicky about actual production try :

http://www.milesev.com/index.asp

Sorry - both sites use flash extensively

Sorry, but it IS. How the hell is Mrs and Mr Average going to be convinced to buy any of those electrical cars? Frankly they look ridiculous and only really make sense if you have no luggage to carry, and don't mind everyone staring all the time.

What we need is an electric "Ford Fiesta" you can charge at home for modest cost and that then does 1000 miles between charges and offers performance similar to a petrol car. Unless someone is going to build a charging network for electric cars that nobody uses, in the hope that people will start to buy the cars that nobody makes.

Oh. And when they've done that someone will have to build a power generation and distribution system up to handling the task of charging millions of cars a day. And work out how to plug the massive hole left in government coffers by the loss of petrol tax. Once the gov cotton on the the idea of taxing the charge in these cars as much as petrol the running costs would be very similar to a petrol car.

Reminds me of the time when Microsoft had the contract to design the OS/2 operating system for IBM whilst developing Windows as their own product.