Vehicle
Tesla Roadster
The car the company started with, and mechanically a Lotus Elise — a bonded aluminium chassis built in Norfolk and shipped to California for its powertrain, so Elise information covers the chassis, suspension and much of the body. It is the only Tesla with a two-speed gearbox in early cars and the only one whose battery is a passively cooled array of thousands of laptop-format cells, an architecture the company abandoned afterwards. Very few exist, so parts rather than diagnosis is the practical constraint.
Generations
-
First generation 2008–2012
A Lotus Elise chassis with a Tesla powertrain; the only Tesla with a two-speed gearbox and a laptop-cell battery architecture.
- Body styles
- Roadster
- Platform
- Lotus Series 2
- Engines
-
- 53 kWh electric — electric
- Transmissions
- Single-speed reduction · 2-speed transmission · 1-speed BorgWarner
- Drivetrain
- Rear-wheel drive
Information, not instruction
CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.
Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.
Posted about the Tesla Roadster
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