This coming Thursday, September 14, IDEO will be hosting the good people of Tesla Motors as part of the ongoing IDEO Know How lecture series.  The lecture is open to the public. This should be a good chance to drink from the cup of (electric) gearhead gnarlyness. 

The lecture will take place at 715 Alma St in Palo Alto at 5pm PST.  Enter via the alley off of Forest Avenue between Alma and High streets   There won’t be a public videotape available afterward.

Here are some selected quotes from Tesla’s website:

Tesla Motors designs and sells high-performance, highly efficient electric sports cars — with no compromises. Tesla Motors cars combine style, acceleration, and handling with advanced technologies that make them among the quickest and the most energy-efficient cars on the road.

“Our goal in designing the Tesla Roadster was to build a car with zero emissions that people would love to drive,” said Tesla Motors co-founder and CEO Martin Eberhard.

The real difference lies in the intent of the designers. For the most part, electric cars have been designed by people who believed we should not drive, and, if we must, then we should drive a bare-bones electric car. In sharp contrast, the Tesla Roadster is a driver‘s car: optimized for performance and handling, beautiful in every detail. Tesla Motors celebrates driving.

It‘s a no-compromise driver‘s car that can accelerate faster than a Porsche 911 and hit a top speed of nearly twice what the law permits. With a range of 250 miles on a single charge, you can use it all day long and not worry you‘ll run out of juice.

Response to the Tesla Roadster has been even greater than we anticipated, and we’ve “sold out” of our special edition Signature One Hundred Roadsters. We’re now taking reservations for our next 100 Tesla Roadsters to be built.

I, for one, am looking forward to the day when I get to lay a big, fat patch of electric torque-tortured tire rubber. 

Update 14sept06:  Tesla has a nifty blog worth checking out