California-based electric car company Tesla Motors is reportedly (according to the National) in talks which could lead to their vehicles being sold in the United Arab Emirates. Ventures in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Qatar are looking at everything from bringing the vehicles in as rental cars to starting championship electric car racing.
News of the Gulf interest in the Tesla Roadster comes as Arab states are increasingly aware of the damage caused by air pollution. As Green Prophet has reported, the Emirates has done much work to shift to renewable energies, including licensing the all electric Reva.
Tesla’s Roadster is a sports car that goes from 0 to 60 mph in just under 4 seconds, has a range of around 250 miles, and takes a full charge in just three hours. The car runs on a Lotus Elise chassis and has been in series production since March 2008. In the US car has a base price of $109,000, and the 250 models allocated to the European market are priced at €99,000 each.
European sales and marketing director Simon Rochefort says talks are underway that could allow Middle Eastern buyers to get the cars in their home region within the next few years. He is in talk with the Gold Green Abu Dhabi and Gold Green Dubai ventures to allow them to import the vehicles to the UAE.
The Dubai project is looking to offer Teslas as options to come with thousand flats being sold on an energy independent island being built in the Persian Gulf. In addition they are looking to establish a small fleet of rental Tesla Roadsters, and possibly using a future sedan model to assemble a fleet of taxis.
Meanwhile two separate groups, one in Dubai and the other in Qatar, are talking with Tesla as they vie to create the world’s first electric sports car championships. The Tesla is being credited with having made electric cars sexy to even non-environmentalists, with Motor Trend having written that the Roadster would be “profoundly humbling to just about any rumbling Ferrari or Porsche that makes the mistake of pulling up next to a silent, 105-mpg Tesla Roadster at a stoplight.”
Rochefort says while the cars aren’t yet sold in the Middle East, he has heard of a few individuals who have purchased them in the US and imported them on their own.
Author: Tyson Herberger
After a stint deep-frying foods, Tyson’s second ever job was as a radio announcer. Since then, a passion for news, community and the environment pushed him through the Center for Environmental Citizenship’s Environmental Journalism Academy and National Public Radio’s Next Generation Radio – not to mention high school and university diplomas. With credentials like those under his belt he was able to get a part-time gig as a newsreader while working a day job in urban renewal. Eventually he gave up community organizing for a full-time career in journalism and media management with assignments in North America, Europe and the Middle East for a variety of radio, web and other endeavors, including Primedia’s now defunct RAM-FM. He’s also an avid hobby photographer Tyson can be reached at tyson (at) greenprophet (dot) com.
I thought this article was supposed to deal with latest electric automobile developments , and not as noted by Mr (of Ms) Parsai.
@Mahmut.
Actually, it seems as if you have it completely and utterly wrong. Nice troll though.
So let me get this right, the Tesla head guy paid GQ magazine to write an article about how arrogant he is and ditched his smart wife and left her with 5 kids for a teenie bopper that he was cheating with and announced a battery deal that was really just an R&D contract and has multiple lawsuits against them by other companies, and may have a car that causes cancer from battery EMF and has created a pool of past staff that write endless blogs about how bad they are and then raised prices because they had no idea how to build a car and lied to the City of San Jose and their customers and applied for their only source of funds without even reading the rules that told them in advance they should never try to build a factory and is trying to sell an insanely expensive car in a depression while every investor has deeply reviewed them and turned them down and Musk won’t even put his money in (of which he has hundreds of millions) and all of their technology has now been superseded by Fisker, Bright and others… ?? … hmmmmmm