Tesla gets a change at the top

By Vivek | August 13th, 2007 at 08:46 am ET         

Lot of changes at car company Tesla in the past few months as it preps up for the launch of the electric roadster priced at $98,000. Mercury News is reporting that Tesla Motors now has a new CEO Michael Marks. Michael will be is replacing Martin Eberhard who will now act as the President of Technology at Tesla.

Earlier Marks was CEO of Flextronics, and was also an early investor in Tesla. Eberhard is a co-founder of Tesla, and had been its CEO since 2003.

Earlier this year Tesla had raised $45M in Series D round of funding. Prior to that Tesla had raised $60 million from it’s Series A, B, and C rounds. Also earlier this year Tesla did a deal with Norway based Th!nk Car company to sell 43 million dollars worth of its Li-ion battery systems.

As I had mentioned earlier, Tesla Roadster will have a 2 speed transmission and lithium ion batteries that can go 250 miles per charge and accelerate you from 0-60 mph in 4 secs. In other terms Tesla Roadster will cost 1cent per mile or equivalent to 135 mpg.