First-ever Tesla was a reworked Lotus Elise with 6,800 batteries
Published on Jul 31, 2025 at 5:19 PM (UTC+4)
by Alessandro Renesis
Last updated on Aug 01, 2025 at 4:22 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Kate Bain
The first Tesla vehicle, the Tesla Roadster, was basically a reworked Lotus Elise with over 6,800 batteries.
It was built on a revised Lotus Elise chassis, and borrowed a lot of its components from Lotus.
Tesla obviously made a lot of changes to fit the battery pack and the electric motor.
But, interestingly, Tesla’s first Roadster was also completely different from all modern Teslas.
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Why Roadster had very little in common with a Model Y or a Model 3
In a recent interview, Tesla’s co-founder Martin Eberhard said if he could go back he’d change two things about the Roadster.
He’d make the electric motor liquid-cooled instead of air-cooled, and he’d use a different charging system.
Decades later, his wishes came true.
Modern Teslas are liquid-cooled, and they have different charging systems and battery packs.
The original Roadster used more or less the same type of battery you’d have found in a laptop back then, but it had over 6,800 of them.
The exact number is 6,831.
This made it a lot heavier than the Elise, but still faster due to its electric motor’s instant torque.
Something else worth noting is that the Elise has always been a simple and rustic car.
Tesla did its best to make the Roadster a bit more refined with thicker seats, a sat nav and cruise control but the Roadster still felt more like a Lotus Elise than a modern-day Tesla Model 3.
What the current value of the first Tesla tells us about EVs
The original Tesla Roadster is a rare case of an electric car that appreciated with value.
Most EVs, especially high-end ones like the Porsche Taycan, depreciate quite quickly, but the opposite happened with the Roadster.
It had an MSRP of around $100,000 when it was new, and it goes for anywhere between $100,000 and even $200,000 (in rare cases) in the market today.
This is probably because it’s rare, only 2,450 were built in total, and also because it’s considered a milestone in electric car history.
