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.
After beginning his automotive writing career at DriveTribe, Alessandro has been with Supercar Blondie since the launch of the website in 2022. In fact, he penned the very first article published on supercarblondie.com. He’s covered subjects from cars to aircraft, watches, and luxury yachts - and even crypto. He can largely be found heading up the site’s new-supercar and SBX coverage and being the first to bring our readers the news that they’re hungry for.
