Photos: Tesla’s sports car drives for a penny a mile

The Tesla Roadster is an all-electric sports car. It costs $90,000 and doesn’t come out until next year, but it cooks. The car and its technology were unveiled this week at a promotional event in Santa Monica, Calif.

Tesla Motors Chairman Elon Musk, center, and CEO Martin Eberhard, right, discuss electric cars with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “It’s terrific,” Conan said.

Front view of the Tesla Roadster. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, investors in Tesla, have each signed up to buy one.

Two production models of the Roadster have been produced.

The Tesla Roadster can go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in four seconds. It tops out at 130mph.

There is no room for a kid’s seat in the Roadster’s cockpit, but it does have one cupholder.

The Tesla Roadster’s transmission does not have a reverse gear. Rather, the motor reverses direction to propel the car backwards.

The car is fast and makes little noise. Because it’s fully electric, it jumps off the line.

Who is the girlie man? Schwarzenegger takes a test drive before jetting away in an SUV.

Here is the internal chassis of the Tesla Roadster. Tesla Motors designed the car but is farming out manufacturing jobs to other plants.

A lot of the work on the car involved developing a good battery pack. “The challenge is the pack, not the (battery) cell,” said Telsa Motors Chairman Elon Musk.

CEO Martin Eberhard stands next to one of the two production-level Tesla Roadsters. So far, 30 people have signed up to buy the electric car.

The Tesla Roadster comes in for photos.

Can the Tesla spit gravel? A test drive says yes.

Here are some of the electronics behind the Tesla Roaster.

The first motor produced by Tesla (on the right) is coupled with a transmission.

Here we see autographs of the engineers who worked on the project.

This is an assembled Tesla engine. Electric engines were neck and neck with gas engines at the turn of the 19th century, but the proliferation of gas stations, combined with the fact that gas-motor companies figured out how to make electric starters, killed the electric car, says Tesla Vice President Malcolm Smith.

Fill ‘er up. This is the electric outlet–the equivalent of a gas tank–where you power the car. The car runs on about a penny’s worth of power per mile, say Tesla backers.

If you plug these cars into a regular socket, it might take anywhere from a few hours to all day to charge. So, Tesla will install these chargers, which concentrate power, in your home. That way, a recharge will take only two to three hours.

The Tesla Mule, a prototype.