I don’t know much about sports cars, high performance vehicles, and even less about how to drive them. But after driving (if you can call it that) a Tesla Roadster in Project Gotham Racing 4 I was intrigued by this electric sports car. It’s the result of a Silicon Valley startup, high-tech VCs and all (including the Google founders). Like many high-tech startups there was some FUD along the way, was an electric high performance engine just vaporware? But with actual cars now shipping, Tesla has sold out almost all of its 2009 production, and their CEO expresses optimism in a recent letter that they will weather out the bad economy despite some order cancellations. The letter also pointed out that the purchase of a Tesla ($109,000 list) is an investment in a company that wants to also develop mass market electric cars. They can actually enable well-off buyers to not feel guilty about spending $100K on a fast car. Tesla hopes to become profitable by mid-2009. By the way, my experience in PGR4 was suitably insane: the Tesla accelerated so quickly with so little noise that I was crashing it all over the place not realizing how fast I was going. Once I got the hang of not using gear clanking and engine noise as my speed indicators, it was a dream. Plus, it’s gorgeous, thanks to Lotus’ hand in the chassis design.