With more than 100 Roadsters delivered to customers so far and more on the road each week, it’s natural for some customers to run “experiments” on them. Because we have such an entrepreneurial and highly technical customer base, many of these experiments are quite detailed and attempt to answer questions that we have in some cases never discussed publicly.

In October, Stephen Casner and his wife Karen toured the Lotus factory in England as their Roadster rolled off the assembly line. They took delivery at the Menlo Park store three weeks later. Stephen, who has written several other blogs about Tesla, describes the tour and his first impressions with the car.

Have you ever wondered how much the electrons that power our car weigh?

Ken Jacobs was one of the first employees at the relational database pioneer Oracle Corporation. He and his wife Margaret are thrilled to be early adopters and advocates for the pioneering Tesla, the car and the company.

It has been several months since we have shared any progress updates on our powertrain development work and in particular how the “powertrain 1.5” program is progressing for the Roadster.

As I make presentations at various conferences regarding our battery pack, or Energy Storage System (ESS), I’m often asked the question ”Isn’t the battery pack toxic” and whether or not it can be disposed of safely. To reach a wider audience, I thought it best to address these questions in our blog.

Two weeks ago, I highlighted how Tesla moved from waves to bits in our motor and charge controller in the PEM. You might have left with the impression that as of June 2007, when the DMC replaced the analog controller, our work as DMC firmware engineers was complete. Fortunately for us (this is fun, remember!), that was far from true.