“We do not plan, for now, to be officially on sale in the Middle East,” says Simon Rochefort, Tesla’s director of sales and marketing in Europe. “But we have two ongoing projects with the UAE that we are very excited about.”
“The first project is with a very large, international company. Their ventures are named Gold Green Abu Dhabi and Gold Green Dubai. The Dubai project is on an island that is under construction. They are really great projects, where you would have something like 1,000 flats on a private resort, in a totally energy- independent environment. Energy is supplied by solar power and windmills; it’s eco-friendly from the bottom to the top, but with a high level of luxury.
“We are involved on several counts; first, the investors who are running this project would like to offer the Tesla Roadster as an option with the flats they are selling. The second thing is that the resort will buy a couple of dozen of Roadsters to be rented to users of the flats. Lastly, they also want to buy, for the Abu Dhabi area, 100 saloons, to use as taxis or transport to the airport.”
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Tesla’s second project in the Emirates involves something for which the two-seat Roadster is much more suited for.
“We are working in Abu Dhabi and Qatar on two similar programmes. We are working on – a first in the world – two electric sports car championships. We have two independent investors, one in each country, who are in discussions with us to create two separate championships.
“The two investor groups are very serious about this, and these projects have a real chance of coming through.”
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Tesla is a company that seems on the way up. Already, its stock of 2008 models has been sold, and this year’s production is sold out until November. Europe’s share of 250 models for this year, (where each car sells for €99,000), is expected to be sold by February.
Some of those countries that have gotten wealthy off of oil are investing in the future quite heavily, bringing in universities, for example. I don't think that it takes a genius to figure out that an economy financed with heavy oil income won't be self-sustaining when that oil dries up in a few years.
It's always a good idea to figure out how to obsolete yourself before somebody else does.
There was a show on Discovery a little while back that had all these oil sheks on it and they were talking about how advanced their systems were. But one of the key points that the sheks were making over and over is that they are heavily consentrating their efforts on finding the next big technology that will replace oil. These guys aint dumb. They are using all this money to get ahead of the curve.....
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